Category: IT Education

  • The Role of Sketching in the Design Process Envato Tuts+

    Analyzing how designers foster communication and collaboration, it is critical to explore the vital role that sketching plays in the design process. The importance of sketching also extends to the collaboration process. By physically drawing out thoughts and ideas, teams can work together to form a cohesive concept that will move the project forward.

    what is the purpose of sketching your ideas

    By focusing on the movement of the pen on paper, you can  relax and let ideas flow. Embrace the freedom of scribbling to add energy and movement to your drawings. It’s an excellent way for beginners to explore dynamic expressions and complex forms. Depending on which sketching type you decide to dive into, you will need a light bag to back your sketching materials. Whether traveling light or not, you need a bag to keep your materials safe and secure.

    Sketch (drawing)

    This process allows for creative growth, improves problem-solving skills, and can lead to innovative design solutions. By sketching, designers can explore multiple options, test various designs, and iterate quickly to improve the product’s overall quality. Because the initial iterations can be rough and unfinished, sketching allows designers to refine their ideas and make changes when needed.

    • By refining the design concept, the designer can ensure that the final product meets the client’s needs, is functional, and aesthetically pleasing.
    • They are more refined from sketches, picking on details such as colors and also stroke weight to present a particular style, emotion and aesthetic.
    • Maps come in handy when you are trying to visualize a particular process, hierarchy or timeline with different points.
    • Thus, a sketch can be evaluated as a cognitive tool for communication with colleagues.

    The letter B printed on drawing pencils indicates that the pencil is black. The word B print pencils are soft and can be used by children to sketch. The F letter is for firm pencils, and the HB represents hard black pencils. These pencils come with different color intensities and are what is sketching in drawing perfect for sketchers with experience. Domestika is a great platform for learning and expanding your artistic skills, including the art of sketching. With a variety of best teachers and online courses in sketching, you can find a course that suits your interests and skill level.

    Browse UX / UI Design Topics

    Getting thumbnail approvals from clients is a common part of the illustration process. It is also common on large logo design projects and other projects as well. Sketching really helps me clear my mind of past projects and really focus on the task at hand. I started sketching in college when I was trying to figure out how to design newspaper pages. The bottom line is that sketching enhances mindfulness and focus, improves spatial and visualization skills, and promotes collaboration in the design process. Sketching is a valuable part of the design process and continues to be a fundamental tool for creative professionals.

    what is the purpose of sketching your ideas

    You don’t have to be perfect, but you must be able to capture the fantasies of your clients and add some colors to them. You must be able to sketch other materials, such as stones, glasses, clothes, and other objects. Sketches help you propose, explore, refine and communicate your design ideas.

    Time and cost

    However, you need a good eraser to clean it without smudging or destroying your sheet. Erasers can also be used to clean pencil lines after a sketch with a pen has been drawn. Drawing pens helps give your sketches definition, depth, and details you won’t be able to achieve with a pencil. We recommend acid-free, lightfast, waterproof pens that won’t smudge or disappear when buying a pencil.

    what is the purpose of sketching your ideas

    By practicing and incorporating sketching into various aspects of life, you can enhance your creative thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills. Your sketches and accompanying text must communicate your entire design rationale to you and your team. All the following elements play their part in explaining your sketches and the objects, actions and emotions they represent. Design and usability processes are complementary but not the same. Design explores a space of possibilities to identify the right design or solution to a problem from competing alternatives.

    People

    Sketching encourages collaboration because it is a visual language that transcends verbal communication barriers. Pull out your pencil to explore ideas and work out thoughts that make sense in your head but are hard to articulate. In sketching, remember the journey is the goal, unlike in art, where it’s the first step in a longer process that becomes more refined into a final piece. Sketch drawing for beginners or painting sketches for beginners helps to develop creativity.

    This sketch is then sent to the customer for approval or for change requests. Once the sketch is finalized, the design moved to the next stage of inking the line work and then coloring the character. Showing sketched thumbnails or compositions to clients, will potentially save you an enormous amount of time. The more detailed the project will be the earlier you want client approval. If you’re going to spend hours on an illustration, you want to make sure the client is in agreement with your choice of design before moving forward.

    Maps come in handy when you are trying to visualize a particular process, hierarchy or timeline with different points. As a UX designer, these include mindmaps, information architecture, site maps, user journey maps and empathy maps. UX Sketching is simply rough drawing by hand, commonly used for generating, communicating and refining ideas. It can be for your own reference, or to be shared with co-workers, team managers, or clients and stakeholders.

    what is the purpose of sketching your ideas

    If you focus on a single design idea prematurely, you narrow your opportunities. Underdrawing is drawing underneath the final work, which may sometimes still be visible, or can be viewed by modern scientific methods such as X-rays. The term is most often applied to graphic work executed in a dry medium such as silverpoint, graphite, pencil, charcoal or pastel. It may also apply to drawings executed in pen and ink, digital input such as a digital pen, ballpoint pen, marker pen, water colour and oil paint. The latter two are generally referred to as “water colour sketches” and “oil sketches”.

    By flipping back a few pages in a notebook, you can see how a project has changed and what elements were added or removed. Get unlimited downloads of 2 million+ design resources, themes, templates, photos, graphics and more. Envato Elements starts at $16 per month, and is the best creative subscription we’ve ever seen.

    what is the purpose of sketching your ideas

  • Understanding Scripting in Programming: A Comprehensive Guide by Vineet Singh

    Today, almost all code is written in one of many programming languages, which have their own libraries, documentation and syntax. Put simply, coding is the act of inputting commands into a computer in a language that it can understand. At the smallest level, computers process everything in binary — 1s and 0s — also called machine code. According to Naukri, computer science graduates can expect to earn as much as 27 per cent more than graduates with non-computer engineering courses [2]. Your level of education, experience, job type, and the scripting language you’re proficient in will influence your salary. These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of scripting languages, but it’s important to note that these limitations can be mitigated by following best practices and using the right tools for the job.

    The power of scripting languages is their ability to automate digital tasks. A few lines of code without branching is probably considered a script. A codebase of multiple files, that performs sophisticated user or hardware interface or complicated algorithms or multiprogramming is probably not considered a script.

    JavaScript guide

    Although coding and scripting are definitely related terms that people frequently confuse with one another, they’re not the same thing. Featured or trusted partner programs and all school search, finder, or match results are for schools that compensate us. This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other editorially-independent information published on this site. For example, Java is not script-like since an application starts at the function named main which need not be at the top of the code.

    • Although coding and scripting are definitely related terms that people frequently confuse with one another, they’re not the same thing.
    • For example, when you open a new browser window to perform a Google search or navigate to a specific website, you interact directly with the program that powers the browser.
    • While all scripting languages are programming languages, not all programming languages are scripting languages.
    • Server-side scripting languages — such as PHP, Ruby and Python — are processed on the host server.
    • The use of scripting languages does not require the same time commitment of more complex programming languages.

    Meanwhile, process automation at the application level can be done by using VBA and AppleScript. As with scripts in general, scripting languages are mostly used to automate processes at the application level. Ruby is a server-side scripting language used for creating web browsers, but it can be used for other program applications as well. Ruby is open-source, meaning that its original source code is free and available for anyone to use. With the advent of graphical user interfaces, a specialized kind of scripting language emerged for controlling a computer.

    Scripting language

    Additionally, most scripting language interpreters are slower than compilers. That is because traditional programming languages are usually converted to machine code before being compiled, thus offering faster execution for the users. The term scripting language is sometimes used in a wider sense, to refer to dynamic high-level programming languages in general. Some are strictly interpreted languages, while others use a form of compilation.

    what is scripting

    This script defines a variable called message and assigns it the value of “Hello World!”. The script is saved with a .js file extension and can be run in a web browser or with a JavaScript runtime environment. At the command line or through a web server, they are able to execute programs running on a web server and display the appropriate uses of a script results to the users. Perl is a general scripting language that’s been around a very long time — since December of 1987, to be exact. Ruby is a strictly object-oriented scripting language, so everything becomes an object when working with it. This is even the case for factors like integers or Booleans which are usually more primitive.

    Client-Side Scripting Languages

    A server-side scripting language operates on the server to generate responses for client requests, with the primary objective of creating dynamic content for web pages. This approach is considered more secure than client-side scripting, as the server handles the execution, enhancing overall security measures. Examples of server-side scripting languages include PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, C#, and Go. C++ is a general-purpose programming language typically compiled before executing the code. C++ is an object-oriented language that is capable of low-level memory manipulation. It was originally intended for system programming and embedded software in large systems.

    what is scripting

    Strongly typed variables also mean that they cannot be inadvertently changed to the wrong type. As the figure shows, conventional programming languages take different approaches to preparing the code. If the language is a conventional one such as C or C++, the code is first passed to the compiler for the initial transformation.

    Interpreted

    Computer programmers, software developers, as well as front-end and back-end developers, use scripting skills in their careers. When looking at scripting vs. programming languages, the difference is that programming languages tell a computer what to do. Many scripting languages, like Python or JavaScript, can also be used to program or build full applications. Many of these languages’ interpreters double as command-line interpreters such as the Unix shell or the MS-DOS COMMAND.COM. Others, such as AppleScript offer the use of English-like commands to build scripts.

    what is scripting

    Some other types of applications that need faster feature addition or tweak-and-run cycles (e.g. game engines) also use an embedded language. The scripting languages used for this purpose range from the more common and more famous Lua and Python to lesser-known ones such as AngelScript and Squirrel. Far back in computer science history, there was no other way in which users could write code, but quickly programming languages were written to give programmers a far more user-friendly coding experience. Scripting languages are often compared with programming languages as though they’re opposite sides of the same coin. However, scripting languages are actually a subset of programming languages. More often than not, such comparisons are meant to distinguish scripting languages from conventional programming languages.

    You can start today by enrolling in a beginner-friendly, self-paced course like Crash Course on Python, a 32-hour course from Google. Or, pursue an IBM Full Stack Cloud Developer Certificate, which includes training in HTML, Node.js, and Python.

    Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector. Very recently, AI models have reached a point where they are beginning to be able to overtake humans in writing programs of their own, but this is still far from proven technology.

    These are just a few examples of scripting languages that power the web and plenty of applications you and millions of other Internet users execute every day. Based on where the script execution takes place, there are two types of scripting languages such as client side and server side. If you’re wondering, “what is scripting language?” we’ll explain it below. We’ll also highlight the differences in the worlds of scripting vs. programming. Finally, we’ll guide you through the most popular scripting languages and how you can learn and use them. For example, Autodesk Maya 3D authoring tools embed the Maya Embedded Language, or Blender which uses Python to fill this role.

    what is scripting

  • Responsive Web Design: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Tips

    On smaller screens, the sidebar is the first to drop off, and its content is moved below the book previews and essential information. Whereas on a wider screen we’d look left to right, on a narrower screen we’d tend to look from top to bottom. Content on the right is moved below content that would appear on the left on a wider screen. Eventually, when the horizontal space is fully limited, the navigation is simplified and stacked vertically, and some repeated or inessential elements are removed.

    • The features any-hover and any-pointer test if the user has the capability to hover, or use that type of pointer even if it is not the primary way they are interacting with their device.
    • On wide screens and browsers, all of the content on this simply designed website is well organized into columns, sidebar and simple navigation up top.
    • A mobile-friendly design means that the website is built to work exactly the same across different devices.
    • Hebron Academy, for example, uses an accordion-style navigation menu to give a preview of what you can find inside each section.
    • For example, the min-width and max-width media queries are combined all the time to set a style specific to a certain range.

    As one can see, the main navigation here is the simple layout of t-shirt designs, spanning both vertically and horizontally across the screen. This happens at each break point when the layout is stressed, but in between the break points, the images just change proportionally in size. This maintains balance in the design, while ensuring that any images (which are essential to the website) don’t get so small that they become unusable. With four relatively content-heavy columns, it’s easy to see how the content here could easily be squished when viewed on smaller devices. Because of the easy organized columns, though, we can also collapse them quite simply when needed, and we can stack them vertically when the space doesn’t allow for a reasonable horizontal span. When the browser is minimized or the user is on a smaller device, the columns first collapse into two and then into one.

    Show Different Images Depending on Browser Width

    A mobile responsive website allows you to create one site that will automatically adjust its layout depending on the device being used by your visitors. This eliminates the requirement of having to construct and maintain two distinct sites, thereby conserving resources in both time and money. When viewed on a standard wide computer screen, more portfolio pieces are featured and spanned horizontally across the page. On a smaller screen, the portfolio piece is cut down to one, and then eventually left out altogether for very small screens and narrow browsers. The visualizations below collapse into fewer columns and more rows, and again, some drop off entirely for very small screens.

    Responsive and mobile website what is it

    A mobile responsive website is a website that is capable of adapting its content based on the device it is being viewed on. However, as the number of users who prefer to browse on a tablet or mobile phone grows, it’s essential for how to design a website the web design also to become more versatile to ensure that all users have an equally positive experience. For each visitor, the website will automatically adjust the layout of its content to match the visitor’s screen size.

    What Is A Responsive Website?

    Although testing the application on a variety of devices is important, depending on the application in question, it could be unnecessarily exhaustive to test it on 3000+ device/browser combinations. Developers can make Mobile responsiveness testing more efficient by testing on the right devices. Therefore, when designing any web application, it’s very important to ensure that it’s mobile responsive. If a product is unable to evolve and adapt, it will become extinct and will get replaced by other products which are able to meet consumer demands. According to global statistics data, the mobile market share is 58% as of October 2022. On adding the tablet market share to this statistic, over 60% of the market share belongs to devices other than desktop devices.

    Responsive and mobile website what is it

    Some “responsive” sites aren’t fully responsive and will strip out functionality that they can’t render for mobile. Before you think about the quality of your content or the services you provide, think about the user and their experience. Here are two major motives why you should invest in a responsive design for your website.

    It has dynamic content that changes, optimized images, correct spacing based on device, and is reliant on mobile operating systems for functionality. With a responsive design, texts and images change from a three-column layout to one that fits your device’s screen perfectly. If you’re on a website on desktop and want to see if it’s responsive, simply shrink the window and observe whether or not the display changes to match the window size. Responsive websites react with the user in mind, and enhance usability no matter what the device is.

    Responsive and mobile website what is it

  • The Difference Between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning? NVIDIA Blog

    Machine learning algorithms usually require structured data, whereas deep learning networks work on multiple layers of artificial neural networks. A deep learning model is designed to continually analyze data with a logical structure similar to how a human would draw conclusions. To complete this analysis, deep learning applications use a layered structure of algorithms called an artificial neural network. The design of an artificial neural network is inspired by the biological network of neurons in the human brain, leading to a learning system that’s far more capable than that of standard machine learning models. You can use both machine learning (ML) and deep learning to identify patterns in data. They both rely on datasets to train algorithms that are based on complex mathematical models.

    Deep learning vs. machine learning

    Alternatively, they might use labels, such as “pizza,” “burger” or “taco” to streamline the learning process through supervised learning. An increasing number of businesses, about 35% globally, are using AI, and another 42% are exploring the technology. In early tests, IBM has seen generative AI bring time to value up to 70% faster than traditional AI. Python is the best programming language out there to do machine learning and deep learning. R is also a popular programming language used by many people for the same purpose.

    What Types of Machine Learning Are There?

    Conversely, deep learning solutions perform feature engineering with minimal human intervention. While deep learning has existed for many decades, the early 2000s saw scientists like Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and services based on artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton explore the field in more detail. Though scientists advanced deep learning, large and complex datasets were limited during this time, and the processing power required to train models was expensive.

    Deep learning vs. machine learning

    This structure found much success in areas like the development of Expert Systems but hit a significant wall when it came to dynamic and responsive thinking machines. It was when engineers began conceptualizing and building brain-like structures known as “neural networks” that machine learning algorithms leaped forward. Conversely, deep learning models take a significant amount of time for someone to analyze in detail, because the models are mathematically complex. That being said, the way that neural networks learn removes the need for people to label data. You can further reduce human involvement by choosing pretrained models and platforms. The accuracy of models highly depends on the size of the input dataset that is fed to the machines.

    What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

    Get started with machine learning and deep learning by creating a free AWS account today. Humans set up Deep Learning systems, but unlike ML models, they don’t need to have the characteristics of the data they’re looking for defined upfront. Instead, Deep Learning systems independently discover and define features in the data they analyze. This makes the findings from Deep Learning more emergent and allows these systems to find patterns or draw conclusions that their creators didn’t know to look for in the first place. Deep Learning systems use an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) composed of multiple nodes or layers, each dedicated to performing a specific function in the system.

    Machine learning and deep learning have clear definitions, whereas what we consider AI changes over time. For instance, optical character recognition used to be considered AI, but it no longer is. However, a deep learning algorithm trained on thousands of handwritings that can convert those to text would be considered AI by today’s definition.

    What is machine learning?

    The way a deep neural network learns is similar to how a biological neural network learns, that is, learning from lots of practice and correcting mistakes. Machine learning can enable computers to achieve remarkable tasks, but they still fall short of replicating human intelligence. Deep neural networks, on the other hand, are modeled after the human brain, representing an even more sophisticated level of artificial intelligence. For more practical use cases, imagine an image recognition app that can identify a type of flower or species of bird based on a photo. Deep learning also guides speech recognition and translation and literally drives self-driving cars.

  • Intro to SQL: Querying and managing data

    Creates an index
    of a column or group of columns within a table. An index essentially
    functions as an ordered list (alphabet or numeric) that provides
    a fast and efficient way to look up records. If a UNIQUE index
    is specified, this indicates an index that does not allow duplicate
    values. Now, let’s focus on some SQL basic commands that one should know when they start learning about SQL. There are many queries that seem to be basic, but I have covered few that are really essential for a beginner. For explaining all the query I have considered the Student table, which I will be using.

    basis sql

    You can add or omit the keyword ASC to sort the output in ascending order. Now, we need to show only employees with a salary above 3,800. It’s a clause that accepts conditions and is used for filtering the output. It goes through the table and returns only the data that satisfies the condition.

    Installation and Setup

    Then we add each column from the table quarterly_sales showing the quarterly sales and name it total_sales_2022. Each column in SELECT also has the table alias before it, with the alias and the column name separated by a dot. It is used to specify the columns on which the two tables will be joined.

    Most websites use databases to store user data, and many developers use SQL to interact with the information they collect. If there is a table with dozens of columns but only five columns need to be accessible, simply create a view for the end-user to present these five columns only. Views show only specific parts of the data selected by the user. First, select the column department from the table employees. As we want to add the salary values, we specify the column salary in the function.

    Database developer

    You can do that using comparison operators in the WHERE clause. This query is useful when selecting two (or more) columns from one table. This query is useful when you want to quickly get all the columns from a table without basis sql writing every column in the SELECT statement. We’ll introduce the dataset, and then we’re off to writing and explaining basic SQL queries. This feature requires that object level permissions
    be enabled on the database.

    basis sql

    With our online SQL editor, you can edit the SQL statements, and click on a button to view the result. The following defines the SQL grammar for SQL statements supported by
    the BASIS DBMS. SQL reserved words are written in upper case to make them
    more readily identifiable. For detailed list of BBj’s support of these specifications, refer to
    BBj
    Support for SQL-99 and SQL-2003 Features.

    SQL — Grammar

    At runtime, the SQL engine uses this information to determine which key to use for iteration. For example, assume there is a key on the LAST_NAME column in a table and one on the STATE column. Now assume that all people in the table live in New Mexico, Colorado, or Texas. Also, assume that most of the people do not have the same last name.

    basis sql

    Then comes the comparison operator, and after that, the value that the data has to be greater than. This condition will now return all the salaries that are above 3,800. However, this time, instead of an asterisk, we write the specific column name in SELECT. All this tells us that this table is a list of a company’s employees and their salaries.

    basis sql

    By default, the user provides values for
    all columns in the record in the order they are defined. A role is a security group that groups together
    one or more users making it easier to assign privileges to multiple
    users. This feature requires that object level permissions be
    enabled on the database. This training will help you understand MySQL in-depth and help you achieve mastery over the subject. We can increase the accuracy and reliability of data that goes into the database through a table with the help of the concept called SQL CONSTRAINTS. These constraints make sure that there is no violation in terms of a transaction of data if found then the action will be terminated.

    • From here we can just type in the query we want to run and we will see the data returned in our terminal window.
    • In SQL we use the NULL term to represent a missing value.
    • For example, a view may look at the customer table, but only display the customer last name and the customer first name fields.
    • An alternative to using the terminal is to connect to the SQLite database via Python.

    To answer the first two of these questions, we can include the table names for each column in our SELECT command. The way we do this is simply to write the table name and column name separated by a .. For example, instead of SELECT order_number, name we would write SELECT orders.order_number, customers.name. Adding the table names here helps the database to find the columns we’re looking for by telling it which table to look in for each. ORDER BY statement helps us to sort the data according to the specified column. The result set of
    the data can be sorted either ascending or descending.