(courtesy of smh.com.au)

For those hoping that all-out war in the Ukraine may still be averted, this weekend hasn’t been pretty.

Along Ukraine’s eastern border, Russian forces are now raising the stakes—and fears of an invasion along with them.

Still, U.S. and Russian leaders might (and that’s a BIG “might”) just find a way to defuse the crisis.

This Friday, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin conversed by phone to discuss a diplomatic solution in the Ukraine. This Sunday, John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov will do the same in Paris.

 A peaceful conclusion to this test of nerves is by no means guaranteed.

But for now, the sabre-rattling is getting knees-knocking… and getting diplomacy moving.

Editors Note: This article was updated to remove references to deprecated components specifically polymer-ajax which has since been replaced by core-ajax. Thanks to Rob Dodson, developer advocate at Google, for the feedback.

Building modern web applications requires a lot of tooling. This includes preprocessors, JavaScript frameworks, testing tools and a whole lot more. And as the complexities of these apps increases, so does the breadth of tooling and services needed to manage them. Wouldn't it be great if some things were simplified?

Web Components aim to solve some of these complexities by providing a unified way to create new elements that encompass rich functionality without the need for all the extra libraries. Web components are comprised of four different specifications (Custom Elements, Templates, Shadow DOM and HTML imports) which are being fleshed out in the W3C.

To bridge the gap and give developers access to this rich functionality now, Google has created the Polymer library which serves as a set of polyfills to bring the promise of Web Components to you today. Let's dive a little deeper into.

What Is Polymer

As I mentioned, the Polymer library is a set of polyfills that help you create Web Components on all major modern browsers. It provides the framework for defining, creating and rendering complex custom elements in a simplistic fashion similar to the tags you've grown up with. What I mean by this, is that it helps to simplify the way we use complex components by:

• Encapsulating much of the complex code and structure
• Allowing developers to use a simple-to-use tag style naming convention
• Providing a suite of predefined UI elements to leverage and extend

But the important thing to remember, is that the framework itself is developed based on the direction of the individual specifications being vetted by the W3C, thus providing a foundation that should evolve with the direction of the main standards body.

What this library can do, is allow us to create reusable components that work as true DOM elements while helping to minimize our reliance on JavaScript to do complex DOM manipulation to render rich UI results.

Here's a quick example from the Polymer site. Say I wanted to render a working clock on my page. That would typically entail some heavy duty JavaScript code to do but by using Polymer, I can simply use the following syntax:

<polymer-ui-clock></polymer-ui-clock>

This looks like the HTML tag syntax we've all grown up with and is far easier to implement, read and maintain than some complex JavaScript code. And the end result looks like this: 

And since it's a normal element in the DOM, you can style it as well using CSS like this:

      polymer-ui-clock {
            width: 320px;
            height: 320px;
            display: inline-block;
            background: url("../assets/glass.png") no-repeat;
            background-size: cover;
            border: 4px solid rgba(32, 32, 32, 0.3);
          }
    

It's certainly not the prettiest clock, but that's not the point. The fact is that you can customize the component to your liking and then reuse it via an easier and more maintainable syntax.

Installing Polymer

There are three ways to install and use Polymer:

• Use the Bower package manager (preferred)
• Use the libraries hosted on CloudFare's cdnjs
• Install from Git

Of the three, the easiest and recommended way is to use Bower because not only is it incredibly easy to do but Bower also manages any dependencies that Polymer might have. This means that if you choose to install a specific UI element which has a dependency on another one, Bower can handle that for you.

Bower is installed as a Node Packaged Module, so you'll need to have Node.js installed. From the command line, type in the following:

npm install -g bower
    

This should pull Bower from the npm registry and install it so it's globally available to you. From there, subsequent Bower-based installs take the following form:

bower install 
    

At a bare minimum, you're going to want to install Polymer's platform and core components since they provide the foundation for you to create and run your customer elements.

bower install --save Polymer/platform 
    bower install --save Polymer/polymer

You can shortcut this by typing in:

bower install --save Polymer/platform Polymer/polymer
    

Polymer also comes with a rich, predefined set of elements that you can begin taking advantage of immediately. They consist of UI and non-UI based elements that provide functionality such as:

• Animation
• Accordions
• Grid layout
• Ajax capabilities
• Menus
• Tabs

And that's only scraping the surface. There's a lot already in there with full source code available to serve as a learning tool, as well as allow you to customize the capabilities to your needs.

You have a choice in how to install these components. You can install everything or only those you want to use. To install everything, you type in:

bower install Polymer/core-elements
    bower install Polymer/polymer-ui-elements

This is the kitchen sink approach and when you're starting out learning Polymer, it's probably easiest just to do that, to help you get a feel for what's available.

Once you're more familiar with the framework, you can cherry-pick the individual components you'd like to use and install them like this:

bower install Polymer/polymer-ui-accordion
    

This is the beauty of using Bower. Every component comes with a bower.json configuration file that outlines its dependencies. So if you were installing the accordion component, looking at the config, we can see that it has dependencies on the main polymer component as well as the selector and collapsible components.

{
      "name": "polymer-ui-accordion",
      "private": true,
      "dependencies": {
        "polymer": "Polymer/polymer#0.2.0",
        "polymer-selector": "Polymer/polymer-selector#0.2.0",
        "polymer-ui-collapsible": "Polymer/polymer-ui-collapsible#0.2.0"
      },
      "version": "0.2.0"
    }
    

The key thing is that you don't have to worry about that because Bower manages that for you. This is why it's the preferred tool for installing Polymer.

Installing via Bower will create a folder called bower_components in your project folder housing all of the stuff Polymer needs.

Making a New Polymer Element

The Polymer site pretty much nails the description of custom elements:

“Custom Elements are the core building blocks of Polymer-based applications. You create applications by assembling custom elements together, either ones provided by Polymer, ones you create yourself, or third-party elements.”

Polymer gives us the ability to create our own custom elements from scratch and even reuse other elements to extend our custom ones. This is done by first creating a template of the custom element. For all intents, this template is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and includes the functionality that will be available when you use the element. It's based off the WhatWG HTML Templates specification which is meant to provide native support for client-side templating.

Let's look at this simple example of a Polymer template:

<link rel="import" href="../bower_components/polymer/polymer.html">
    
    <polymer-element name="lorem-element">
      <template>
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.</p>
      </template>
    </polymer-element>

This Element allows you to easily add Lorem Ipsum text into your code by simply using the following tag:

<lorem-element></lorem-element>

The first thing that needs to be included is Polymer core, which is the main API that allows you to define the Custom Elements:

<link rel="import" href="../bower_components/polymer/polymer.html">

The next step is defining the name of the new element using Polymer's polymer-element directive:

<polymer-element name="lorem-element">

In this case, I've named my new element lorem-element. The name is a required attribute and it must contain a dash (“-”).

From there we use the template directive to wrap the main body tags and code that will make up our new element. For this simple example, I grab Lorem Ipsum text and wrapped it with paragraph tags.

That's it! My custom element is done and I can now use it.

Using Your New Polymer Element

Keep in mind that this component will be imported into other pages in your web app that may want to leverage it. This is possible because of Polymer's implementation of the HTML Imports specification that allows you to include and reuse HTML documents in other HTML documents.

First, you need to include platform.js which provides the polyfill that mimicks the native APIs:

<script src="bower_components/platform/platform.js"></script>

Next, we need to import our custom element into our web page:

<link rel="import" href="lorem-element.html">

Once you've done this, your new custom element is now available allowing you to do something like this:

<div><lorem-element></lorem-element></div>

You also have the ability to fully style the element as well:

<style>
          div { width: 300px;}
          lorem-element { font: bold 16px cursive;}
    </style>

This is a pretty basic example. Let's take it a step further.

Adding More Functionality to Your Element

If you remember, I mentioned how you can leverage existing elements to enhance your custom one. Let's look at an example of this.

Suppose I wanted to have an element that went out to Reddit and grabbed data from one of the subreddits. I could take advantage of Polymer's existing Ajax component by including that in my custom element like this:

<link rel="import" href="../bower_components/polymer/polymer.html">
    <link rel="import" href="../bower_components/core-ajax/core-ajax.html">
    
    <polymer-element name="reddit-element">
      <template>
        <core-ajax url="http://www.reddit.com//r/aww/about.json" auto response="{{resp}}"></core-ajax>
        <p>{{resp.data.public_description}}</p>
      </template>
    </polymer-element> 

Notice that I'm importing the Polymer Ajax component and then dropping it into my template. This now makes it easy to reference my new element which makes the XHR call to pull back the JSON data and fill it into my paragraph tags with the subreddit's public description:

“Things that make you go AWW! Like puppies. And bunnies... and so on... A place for really cute pictures, videos and stories!”

The response is returned and Polymer establishes a two-way data binding that allows me to be able to use the data by wrapping it in double curly braces like this {{resp.data.public_description}}.

This is cool but in most cases, we're not going to hardcode a URL for a specific resource. Let's expand this further by adding attributes to our custom element. Doing this is incredibly simple. First, you need to update the polymer-element directive to reflect the attributes you want for your custom element:

<polymer-element name="reddit-element" attributes="subreddit">

In this case, I want to be able to pass a subreddit to my element and have it pull back data based on that. I can now change the call to polymer-ajax like this:

<core-ajax url="http://www.reddit.com//r/{{subreddit}}/about.json" auto response="{{resp}}"></core-ajax>

Notice how I'm using Polymer's data binding capabilities to dynamically build the URL based on the attribute value of {{subreddit}}. Now, I can update how I reference my custom element to pass in the subreddit that I want:

<reddit-element subreddit="aww"></reddit-element>

The last thing I want to do is ensure there's a default value for my attribute so my code doesn't blow up. I do this by adding the following into my element template:

  <script>
        Polymer('reddit-element', {
          subreddit: "aww"
        });
      </script>

This ensures that I'll always have a default value for my element's public attribute. Here's how the final code looks like:

<link rel="import" href="../bower_components/polymer/polymer.html">
    <link rel="import" href="../bower_components/core-ajax/core-ajax.html">
    
    <polymer-element name="reddit-element" attributes="subreddit">
      <template>
        <core-ajax url="http://www.reddit.com//r/{{subreddit}}/about.json" auto response="{{resp}}"></core-ajax>
        <p>{{resp.data.public_description}}</p>
      </template>
      <script>
        Polymer('reddit-element', {
          // These default values are overridden
          // by the user's attribute values.
          subreddit: "aww"
        });
      </script>
    </polymer-element> 

And there's quite a bit more stuff you can do including adding custom callback handlers, managing events, setting up Mutation Observers to process changes to the DOM and much more.

The Future Is Here

Web Components are going to change the way we build web apps and Polymer is bringing this to us today. You now have the ability to create your own customized and maintainable components that can be catered to the specific needs of your application. These components can be easily shared allowing other teams or the community to easily share and benefit from these encapsulated building blocks.

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.

This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for April 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please note that:

• All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
• You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

Easter

Designed by Aleksandra Kucher from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Sweet April Showers Do Bring May Flowers

“Discover the seasonal fruits and vegetables in April: artichoke and beans walking in the rain!” — Designed by Vitaminas Design from Spain.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Good Day

“Some pretty flowers and spring time always make for a good day.” — Designed by Amalia Van Bloom from the United States.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 640×1136
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 640×1136

Have A Smashing Easter!

“Easter is the only time of the year when it’s perfectly safe to put all your eggs in one basket… even the craziest ones” — Designed by Marielle Perikly Kokosidou from Greece.

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• with calendar: 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Happy Easter

“Easter Bunny is kind of confused. He was very surprised when silly chicks popped out of these colorful eggs! Happy Easter from Lights.com team.” — Designed by Lights.com team from Brooklyn, NY.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 640×960, 2048×2048, 2560×1600, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 640×960, 2048×2048, 2560×1600, 2880×1800

Relax!

“…and enjoy your Easter holidays with some good chocolate.” — Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Brazil.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 640×960, 1366×768, 1600×1050, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 640×960, 1366×768, 1600×1050, 2880×1800

April Cosmos

“I was inspired by a non-fiction book The Living Cosmos written by University of Arizona professor of astronomy Chris Impey. It’s a research of scientists trying to address the questions we ask about nature. Is there life in the universe beyond the Earth?” — Designed by Paul Ranosa from the Philippines.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

April Fool’s Day

“April Fool’s Day is harmless fun and a great way to get a new month kick started. The spring colors welcome the new season, while the pranks steal the stage. Our favorite is the Whoopie Cushion. It gets a laugh every time.” — Designed by Clarity Creative Group from Orlando, FL.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

The Pablo Neruda’ s Spring

“I love this phrase that is referred to when we have a dream, nothing can stop us.” — Designed by Verónica Valenzuela from Spain.

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• with calendar: 800×480, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 800×480, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Dark Pastel

“A combination of gloomy spring showers and Easter.” — Designed by Matt Noa from the United States.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800, 640×960
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800, 640×960

Earth Day!

Designed by Brandi Redd from the United States.

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• with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Flying On A Rainy day!

“April is the month of spring or autumn depending where you live on the globe! It’s also the second rainiest month of the year. I was inspired by one simple motif to illustrate rain, birds and flowers. So either you witness rainy days or colorful ones … Enjoy April!” — Designed by Rana Kadry from Egypt.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 1366×768, 640×960
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 1366×768, 640×960

April Showers

“April showers bring May flowers.” — Designed by Travis Bellinghausen from the United States.

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• with calendar: 640×960, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 640×960, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Cleanse

Designed by Dylan Baumann from the United States.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×600, 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×600, 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1440

Ipoh Hor Fun

“Missing my hometown’s delicious “Kai See Hor Fun” (in Cantonese), that literally translates to “Shredded Chicken Flat Rice Noodles”. It is served in a clear chicken and prawn soup with chicken shreds, prawns, spring onions and noodles.” — Designed by Lew Su Ann from Brunei.

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• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 1366×768
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 1366×768

Two Mountains

“This wallpaper was created to remind you to climb your mountain of challenges each day.” — Designed by Randal Baker Jr. from Evansville, Indiana.

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• with calendar: 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

April X Tribeca Film Festival

“With April comes spring, flowers and a fresh breathe of warmth and creativity. April also brings one of the most creative and innovative events of the year, the Tribeca Film Festival.” — Designed by Zack Aronson from New York, US.

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• with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Moon Mozzarella

“Well, I was walking down the street one evening and the moon was shining brightly. I wondered what sort of cheese the moon could be made of and the first thing that came to mind was mozzarella! I also enjoy eating mozzarella.” — Designed by Christie Hill from South Africa.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Red April

“My plant that keeps me company everyday on by desk in the studio and from time to time gives me inspiration.” — Designed by Alexandru Nastase from Romania.

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• with calendar: 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

A Little Drop Of Rain

“April is a month associated with rainy days. I enjoy photographing how the weather can change the perspective of everyday things. On this rainy day, I captured the rain drops as they clung to my blue and pink polka dot umbrella.” — Designed by Claire Scoufis from Tampa, FL.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×960, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 640×960, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800

The Collection Of Birds

“The collection of birds are my travels. At each destination I buy a wood, bronze, stone bird, anything the local bazaars sell. I have all gathered at a modest vitrine in my house. I have so much loved my collection, that, after taking pictures of them I then designed each one, then created a wallpaper and overdressed a wall of my living room. Now my thought is making them as a desktop wallpaper and give them to you as a gift” — Designed by Natasha Kamou from Greece.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 2560×1600, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 2560×1600, 2880×1800

Not To Be A Patient In Love

“Have patience in love, not to be a patient.” — Designed by Zanetine Web Design from India.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 800×800, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1200×1200, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1080
• without calendar: 320×480, 800×800, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1200×1200, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1080

Join In Next Month!

Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

A big thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month!

What’s Your Favorite?

What’s your favorite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comment section below.

(il)

© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2014.

Australia’s IWebGate expanding to UMBC

Ryan McDonald
Digital Producer- Baltimore Business Journal

The closest city to cyber security executive Tim Gooch is a nearly three-hour plane ride away. That makes doing business a little bit difficult.

But when he moves to Baltimore in April from Perth, Australia, he’ll be less than one hour away from some major metropolitan areas.

Gooch, the CEO of iWebGate, is moving with his family to Charm City to open a U.S. office for a company he helped found in 2004.

IWebGate developed a software platform that can be installed on a cloud-based network or at a company’s office. The software battles cyber attacks on private networks and ...

Subscriber content http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/print-edition/2014/03/28/australia-s-iwebgate-expanding-to-umbc.html

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? You find yourself in a coffee shop abroad, sipping cappuccino and chomping a muffin as you realize that your laptop’s battery charge is just about to crush your creative session to dust. Well, perhaps you’ve got your power adapter with you but, of course, it isn’t the right one for foreign power sockets.

So you end up looking around and chatting up with strangers asking for help. Some are more responsive than others, and before you know it, you don’t just have a full battery, but you’ve made a couple of new, surprisingly interesting acquaintances.

As it turns out, forgetting your power adapter is not only a great way to meet fantastic people but also a great strategy to come up with original ideas. In fact, this is exactly how the idea for the new Smashing Riddle was born—in a coffee shop in Zürich, Switzerland—and yes, it was indeed that cinnamon muffin that made all the difference in the end.

Letters Scattered All Over The Place, Like Muffin Crumbs

Animations have a way of drawing attention to themselves. So it’s understandable that a vibrant animated GIF might raise some interest, questions, or perhaps the reasonable concern of friendly strangers. Desperately looking for a charger, I sparked a number of awkward conversations with surprisingly unsurprised, friendly strangers around me.

In the end, as the charger issue was successfully resolved, I found myself sitting behind a large wooden desk, immersed in a profound discussion with a charming, smart math student from Switzerland, and an eager, seasoned engineer from Turkey. It was a fast-paced, inspiring discussion about life stories, experiences, biggest failures and creative endeavours.

This is how it all started. The letters scattered all over the GIFs were inspired by muffin crumbs scattered all over a plate. (Image source: jentilley)

As the conversation continued—still sipping those Zürich cappucinos—I caught glimpses of one of the older animated GIFs looping on my screen, and before I knew it, the conversation was all about mysteries, riddles and mischievous animated GIFs. During an intensive, unscheduled, battery-recharge brainstorming session, we came up with a number of interesting ideas, all thoroughly written down, tagged and ready for use. One of the ideas was to play with the letters and the way they would be displayed.

You see, at SmashingMag, we cherish the idea of lasting traditions—be it monthly desktop wallpapers, editorial newsletters or those weird mystery riddles. So in the spirit of tradition, the riddle obviously had to be based on animated GIFs, but we wanted to do something entirely different from changing file names or guessing Twitter handles.

Originally, before my trip to Zürich, we had thought about using a number of invisible semi-transparent “layers” hidden in animated GIFs (erm, hey, we actually should do it for the next one!), and later on we spent quite some time prototyping the “reflection” idea in which a hidden message would be revealed once an actual mirror was placed up against the screen. The latter proved to be quite difficult later on in implementation, especially due to the wide diversity of screens out there.

During the brainstorming session, we came up with an idea to do something along the lines of Scrabble, so the readers would derive clues from a number of GIFs and construct a secret keyword out of the letters discovered in those GIFs. And what if letters were scattered all across the GIFs very much like the crumbs of the muffin were scattered all across my plate? Some letters could be hidden, others would be clearly visible, and all of them would be turned, or flipped, or rotated, or skewed for confusion—very much in the spirit of the “reflection” idea we had in the beginning. That’s one of the ideas I brought back to the office after my trip to Zürich.

A New Mystery, A New Design Challenge

Our previous mysteries required a lot of tinkering and experimentation but, frankly, quite a bit of luck as well. The most important bit was to come up with the right approach. For the new riddle, we wanted to keep things a bit simpler and apparently easier to draw in as many readers as possible without the riddle becoming too annoying after the first few tries.

Of course, the riddle shouldn’t be too easy either, so instead of hiding letters of one single word in GIFs, we felt that hiding parts of a sentence might work a bit better. We needed a twist though, something that would make the riddle a bit more interesting and cause one or two “Aha!” moments. We thought about using lowercase symbols to introduce more confusion but ‘i’ and ‘l’ might look too similar in a small resolution, so instead we looked specifically for letters that could be confusing and decided to rotate them or skew them until they actually become confusing. It wasn’t the only twist though, as you’ll see later in the article—a few fine adjustments and twists were added during the test phase later on.

Whenever a new mystery is created, the first thing we do is set up the scene for the riddle. Our dear animator Guillaume knows exactly how to create just the right atmosphere. An early draft. (Large preview)

So when Paul Boag’s new book was about to be published, we jumped right into the idea, came up with a sentence and scattered parts of that sentence across three animated GIFs. Each GIF contained a few scattered letters (all uppercase) that readers were supposed to use to build words. Once you put the words from all the GIFs together, you’d be able to create a sentence—and, of course, no letters should be left unused. So once the sentence is constructed, it had to be tweeted @smashingmag using the hashtag #smashing. Of course, we’d also hidden a few clues in the image captions under each animation and in the corresponding file names.

Easy-peasy? Well, let’s see how it works, and what hidden clues those weird animations contain. (But seriously, who would put skewed letters on the floor and walls anyway, right?)

1. “Change”: Get Out Of That Desk Already

You know it, and we know it: nothing is more frustrating than stubborn management. Usually, changing workflows, processes and culture seems to be impossible, but perhaps something can be done about it after all. At least if you trust the hint provided for the very first animated GIF.

Nothing is more frustrating than stubborn management. Perhaps it’s just about time to do something about it. Three words, one of them on the floor. (Large preview)

Well, if you are playing Scrabble or any other word-building game, the first thing you have to do is gather everything you’ve gotc. So alright, we have to find three words in the GIF. Let’s collect the letters first, starting from the left-bottom corner:

TCRIEZDOU

Alright. Well, we are smart, so why don’t we just use an online anagram solver to make the sense of these letters? We don’t want to do it manually, right? Hmmmm. No result. It doesn’t make sense. That’s weird. There must be a trap. Perhaps we are missing something: we could argue about “O”, if it’s actually the letter ‘O’ or the digit ’0′, but apparently we can rule out digits since all characters are supposed to be uppercase letters. But wait a second: if you rotate “Z” through 90 degrees, you end up with an “N”, right? So perhaps the combination is different:

TCRIENDOU

Ah, that’s better. Looks more like English. We’d better watch out for those traps. Okay, if we play around with it, we can figure out that the word hidden here is… NORDIC TEU, erm, TCRIONDUCE, er… aha! INTRODUCE! Nailed it.

Okay, it wasn’t too hard. So what about the two missing words? Same game, same rules. Let’s collect the letters first:

INTRODUCE HCANEGDATIGIL-=

Mmm. Wait, wait. Only letters are allowed, so the yellow sticky notes with an equals sign and the dash are probably another trap since only uppercase letters have to be considered. We can remove them:

INTRODUCE HCANEGDATIGIL

Okay, it smells… easy. Probably the best way to avoid mistakes in discovering the words is to move letters around until they start making sense, probably with CMD+X and CMD+V. Right, right. The shiny new book on the table can’t just sit there on its own—what’s the title again? Digital Adaptation. Ah wait; wouldn’t “DIGITAL” fit nicely here, and in fact, the letters are right there, aren’t they?

INTRODUCE DIGITAL HCANEG

Well, it’s time to do something about that frustration, right? Probably just the right time for a… change?

INTRODUCE DIGITAL CHANGE

Bingo! Well, at this point we know that every animated GIF contains a couple of words, but it looks like they might be connected on their own as well. We might try to distribute the letters in an other way, but this solution does look quite fitting. Okay, let’s hope for the best and move to the next one.

2. “Convincing”: They Listen But Don’t Move

Well, perhaps you still have the enthusiasm to convince your colleagues about a more pragmatic, effective workflow. But is it really usually colleagues who need this kind of convincing?

It’s difficult to convince them, though. But if not you, who else will help the company and bring it on the right path? Three words. (Large preview)

Oh well, at least it looks like those people in the meeting are paying attention to what that guy is so passionately explaining. Again, let’s collect the letters scattered over the table first, and we should keep the variations in mind as well: “M” could be a “W” and “Z” could be an “N”, and “L” in left upper corner looks surprisingly similar to a skewed “J” (by design or by mistake?). So we’ve got:

AHP[L/J]EEA[M/W][Z/N]ETG[N/Z]

Oh wait, there is another one, in the upper left corner under the plant! Is it “M” or “W”? Let’s consider both options. Okay, that’s freaky:

AHP[L/J]EEA[M/W][Z/N]ETG[N/Z][M/W]

That’s quite a few combinations. We must be smarter about this. Let’s look at the image caption. The caption talks about “convincing them”, but what does it refer to? Ah, stubborn management from the first GIF. Perhaps the guy in the GIF is trying to convince… managers?

MANAGE HP[L/J]EET[N/Z][M/W]

Umm… almost. So we have neither “R” nor “S” here, so what else could it be? Ah! Perhaps management?

MANAGEMENT HP[L/J]E

Nice! Well, there aren’t many four-letter-words with “H”, “P” and “J”, so we probably should stick with the “L”. Could it be… HPLE, or to be more precise, HELP. Well, it sounds about right, especially since “help” is also mentioned in the image caption to that GIF.

MANAGEMENT HELP

The “A” was hidden fairly well in the pie chart on the presentation wall, wasn’t it?

Good, good, it wasn’t too difficult after all. Oh snap. It was supposed to be three words. Did we miss something? Let’s take a closer look around the room again. The presentation chart has a few graphs on it, doesn’t it? Circles, bars, a pie… but that pie, there’s something suspicious about it! Doesn’t the piece of the pie look like an “A”? An invisible “A”, maybe? Well, it is…

MANAGEMENT HELP A

Alright! That’s a long shot, but let’s go with it for now, and let’s proceed with the last one.

3. “Difference”: It’s Going To Be Just Fine

Alright, we know how it works by now. Look closely everywhere on the image and gather all the letters first: that means looking on the carpet, under the chair and under the plant. And then double-check everything to make sure that we don’t miss anything. Also, we know that we can’t trust the colours and the position of letters, they didn’t help us in the past but instead confused (and annoyed) us a bit.

In fact, you’ve got nothing to lose. And who knows, in the end, it might turn out even better than you expected. Four words. The letters on the floor belong together, in one word. (Large preview)

We know that the words on the floor belong together, in one word. Let’s start with them:

ARE

Oh well, there aren’t too many options here: it could be either “ERA” or “ARE”. Could it be that easy? Well, let’s keep it this way for now, and gather all the other letters, from the left to the right:

HEFRE[M/W]KCTDE[N/Z]FIEEA

And we have something that appears to be a blank piece of paper. What’s that thing now? An invisible character? Or a sign that a character is hidden? Or an empty space? Also, could something be hidden under the book, or behind the picture, or on the other side of the chair? OK, OK, let’s not get paranoid here. Deep breath. So we’ve got three words to figure out here.

Well, it might take a while, so let’s watch out for clues. The guy in the chair seems to have it all figured out. Perhaps we should check the larger preview of the image. Oh snap, its file name is… difference.gif. Is it… could it be…?

DIFFERENCE H[M/W]KTEEA

OK, this sounds about right. The combination of available unused letters doesn’t leave that many options: WEH KTEA, MATE HKE… Hmmm. Well, since the character in the chair is victorious, and it’s all about difference, perhaps he… made it?

DIFFERENCE MAKE HTE

Better! We’re almost there:

[ERA/ARE] DIFFERENCE MAKE THE

Sometimes thumbs-up could mean more than a sign of appreciation. The invisible “L” that was missing to turn “REA” into the word “REAL”.

Phew, now, that was quite a journey! But wait a second! That guy passing by, giving a thumbs-up to the character in the chair… Doesn’t it look like an “L”? The image caption says that the words on the floor belong together, but it doesn’t say that they build up an entire word. Well, if we added “L” to [ERA/ARE]… Oh:

REAL

“REAL”! So perhaps it’s about making a real difference in the end. OK, let’s keep it in mind for now.

Yes, of course, there might be many solutions and we would accept all of them if all letters were used, but after 45 minutes of collaborative brainstorming we discovered that it was highly unlikely that you could construct an entirely different, perfectly meaningful sentence by using all letters scattered across the GIFs, leaving no letters unused. Now it’s time to bring all these words together and try to construct something more or less meaningful out of it.

“Solution”: Making Sense Of It All

INTRODUCE DIGITAL CHANGE
    MANAGEMENT HELP A
    DIFFERENCE MAKE THE [ERA/ARE/REAL]

Okay, well, it doesn’t look too scary! It’s probably as easy as something along the lines of “Help the management introduce digital change: make real difference.” In fact, yes, we would accept all solutions which include “ERA” and “ARE”, but a sentence shouldn’t be just a loose pile of unconnected words. These are all the options which you could build out of this mess of letters:

Livia Labate is one of the solvers of the riddle. Yep, it was a bit of work indeed.

• Help the management introduce digital change: make a real difference.
• Help management make the difference. Introduce digital. Change era.
• Digital era: introduce a change, help management, make the difference.
• Manage digital era change, introduce a plan, make the difference.

So here we are. A little journey from muffin crumbs to letters scattered all over the place, shady characters and a few invisible characters. Time to reveal and reward the winners.

Winners!

It’s showtime! Surprisingly to us, the riddle didn’t take much less time to resolve than the previous ones. First place was earned by the person who was quickest and the closest to solving the riddle, i.e. have found all the right words in the riddle and leaving no letters unused. Please notice that since nobody discovered the “REAL” bit, we had to relax the rules a little. We raffled the other prizes across the first people who tweeted a correct sentence, and tried our best to exclude copycats. The winners can select any prize of their choice (be it a bag, a Smashing Library account, printed books or anything else). And they all get the Smashing Cody Stress-Relief Ball, too. All winners have been contacted.

The first perfectly correct sentence with no letters left unused was tweeted by Dorin Moise from Brussels, Belgium, one hour and five minutes after the mystery went live, with: “there, make a difference: help management introduce digital change.” It’s not quite correct but it was the fastest and the most precise tweet. Congratulations, Dorin! You just won a roundtrip to our lovely hometown Freiburg for the Smashing Conference Freiburg, a stay in a fancy hotel and a few Smashing Books. Yaaay!

And here are the other winners:

• Paul Rose (1h 2min): “Make a difference, help management introduce digital change.”
• Braunson Yager (1h 17min): “Help management make the difference, introduce the digital era.”
• Charlie Park: “Introduce a digital era; help management make the change.”
• Razvan (3h 21min): “Introduce digital change: help management make a difference there.”
• Livia Labate (Washington DC, USA): “Help management introduce digital change: make a difference there!”
• Eva Kavaliotou: “Help management make the difference. Introduce digital. Change era.”
• Ed Hicks: “Digital era: introduce change, convince management, help make the difference.”
• Andreas Busschop: “Make difference. Help introduce the digital management era.”

Congratulations! And thanks to everyone who participated! We hope we didn’t waste too much of your productive work time (and didn’t cause too many headaches either).

Behind The Scenes

Guillaume Kurdjian is a 22-year-old freelance illustrator and animator from Nantes, France. Guillaume likes to experiment with stuff on his computer and climb trees.

Just like the last two times, we worked with talented Guillaume Kurdjian on a series of animated GIFs for the riddle. This time the discussion thread was a bit shorter, and after thorough conversations and prototypes, we ended up with quite a number of different GIFs, drafts, and ideas that were thrown away, as well as the ones that made it to the final stage.

All designs were a series of iterations to make the overall riddle not necessarily perfect, but just right. So a big “thank you!” to Guillaume for following through and being so enthusiastic and kind about all the changes made.

Ah, it is a great feeling to solve that damn riddle, isn’t it? Well, you don’t really make the difference, but it’s pretty, pretty good nevertheless. (Large preview)

As it always is with a public hashtag, it can be quite difficult to separate between the “real” tweets and copies of the tweets. We didn’t choose the hashtag #smashing by accident since it is a quite “messy” hashtag on Twitter, but it wasn’t good enough since we saw lots of weird activities going on, with people reusing tweets 1:1 which we of course didn’t accept. We did look very closely at the dates and profile and activities of every winner to prevent copycats from winning. (We probably will go with #cats next time or even better—will challenge you to construct the “right” hashtag on your own).

Poor frames on the wall must have quite a number of finger prints now; we’ll have to bring the room in order later. And yes, apparently those yellow stick-it notes were quite confusing indeed! (Large preview)

The first GIF wasn’t really a problem for anyone. However, for some weird reason the word “convincing” started to pop up in tweets, although the letter “V” didn’t make its public appearance anywhere—in neither of all those GIFs. Quite a number of readers discovered “game plan” in the second GIF and was confused about the number of words that would be hidden in the second GIF if “game plan” actually was hidden there.

Wordsmith encountered server hiccups 30 minutes after the riddle went live, but of course we don’t take any responsibility for it.

The truth is that “game plan” wasn’t the part of our initial plan, so we take no responsibility for massive headaches or confusion caused—sorry about that!. Also, apparently Wordsmith encountered server hiccups 30 minutes after the riddle went live, but of course we don’t take any responsibility for it either.

Sam Stealth-Geek Tremaine and his colleagues went as far as trying to decode the movements of the character speaking in front, using semaphore. (Image credit.)

The most trouble was caused by the second GIF which caused quite a lot of headache for many readers. You could go as far as trying to decode the movements of the animated character who could be using semaphore, a marine alphabet. This wasn’t the plan either.

Are we waiting for round 4 already?

So this is it! It was quite a journey, but we hope it was worth it. We are really sorry about all the unproductive hours that you spent solving the riddle. Well, kind of. Now, are you ready for the next round? ;-) Stay tuned!

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2014.