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The update is set to roll out to the public sometime over the next few weeks.

Picking the right social media platform for your business can be a bit tricky. With all the cool new stuff you can do on social media, it’s important to know what you want from your digital marketing. This way, you won’t get overwhelmed by too many choices. But this sounds easier to say than done. Fear not – we’ll dive deep into the most popular social media platforms and see how you can use each one of them in your business growth. 

Find your audience

To begin, let’s focus on the people you’re trying to reach. So, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook were each made for specific reasons, which naturally means they attract different types of people. It’s quite expected that these platforms have their own unique audiences. Let’s dive deep into the distinct audience that frequents each of these social media platforms.

Instagram audience analysis

Instagram is a hotspot for those who love visuals. It’s like a virtual gallery where people share their lives through cool pictures and short videos. So, you’ll mostly find younger people here who really care about how things look. People who like fashion, food, traveling, and being creative feel at home on Instagram. It’s a spot where style, beauty, and artistry shine.

TikTok audience analysis

TikTok is a playground for creativity and short-form entertainment. Its audience comprises primarily Gen Z and young millennials who are always on the lookout for the next viral trend or amusing challenge. These users aren’t just passive consumers; they actively participate by creating their own videos. If your target audience craves quick, amusing, and often quirky content, TikTok is where you’ll find them.

Facebook audience analysis

Facebook, often hailed as the pioneer of social media, has evolved into a diverse community hub. Its user base spans across generations, making it a virtual meeting place for family, friends, and acquaintances. The audience here is more broad-ranging, from young adults to seniors, encompassing a mix of personal connections, interest groups, and businesses. If you seek a platform where long-form content, discussions, and community building take center stage, Facebook is the realm to explore.

So, to strategically use each social media platform first you need to know where to find your audience. When you know where your audience is, you can tailor specific digital marketing goals.

Content Flexibility and Format Adaption

When it comes to choosing the right social media platform for your marketing goals, it’s important to consider the distinct content styles and post formats of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Instagram’s emphasis on arresting visuals and compelling narratives allows you to showcase your products or services in an alluring manner. If your marketing objective revolves around solidifying brand identity and captivating an audience, Instagram provides an ideal stage. Leveraging striking images, captivating videos, and immersive stories to craft a compelling brand narrative that resonates.

On the other hand, TikTok tries on fostering creativity and seizing trending opportunities. Its format, characterized by brief and dynamic content, magnetizes users seeking quick and engaging interactions, If your marketing goal entails promoting engagement through viral challenges and trend-driven initiatives, TikTok emerges as a potent platform. 

Meanwhile, Facebook adopts a holistic approach to brand presence and community cultivation, If your marketing strategy focuses on building a devoted customer base, engaging with a wide age spectrum, and delivering informative and interactive content, Facebook is the way to go. Employ a mix of posts, articles, videos, and live sessions to cultivate deeper engagement and instill a sense of belonging within your community.

Advertising Comparison: Finding Your Platform Fit

Now, let’s talk about advertising on each platform. Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook present distinct avenues, each with its own set of advantages. Here’s a breakdown to help you effectively navigate the advertising landscape.

Instagram and Facebook: The Meta Duo

Both Instagram and Facebook are under the Meta platform, offering seamless advertising solutions. By allowing the algorithm to decide where to display your ads based on user behavior, you tap into a dynamic system that optimizes ad delivery. Manual algorithm restrictions might inadvertently result in a higher cost per impression (CPM) and hinder the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. Trusting the algorithm’s discernment optimizes reach and engagement, ensuring your message reaches the right audience at the right time.

Facebook and TikTok: The Cost Factor 

In the realm of cost-effectiveness, TikTok often emerges as the more budget-friendly option. The platform’s relative novelty in advertising means less saturation and competition compared to Facebook. As a result, advertising on TikTok can yield a lower CPM, stretching your ad budget further. While Facebook’s extensive reach is unparalleled, TikTok’s affordability provides an enticing opportunity to maximize your return on investment.

Competition Dynamics

TikTok’s relatively lower competition compared to the well-established Facebook can be advantageous. With a less crowded advertising space, your brand’s message stands out more vividly, potentially leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. The freshness of TikTok’s advertising allows for a greater share of the spotlight, particularly for brands seeking a unique and less cluttered environment to showcase their product.

Exploring and Experimenting: The Test and Try Approach

The “test and try” approach is all about trying things out and learning from them. As we said before, each platform has its own special ways and the audience who use them act differently. When you start trying things out, it’s smart to think about how much each platform can bring in over time. This is where Lifetime Value (LTV) comes in. By using some of your marketing budgets to try out different types of ads, creative looks, and groups of audiences, you can see which strategies work the best for keeping customers interested and making more money in the long term. This approach doesn’t just help you get better at making ads but also helps you quickly adjust to new trends and changes in what people like.

Summing up

As you navigate the world of digital marketing across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, remember that each platform brings its unique strengths to the table. By tailoring your content, experimenting, and adapting to your audience, you’ll chart a successful course for your marketing endeavors.

Featured image by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

The post Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook: Choosing the Right Platform for your Digital Marketing goals appeared first on noupe.

So, you need to build a website, and your budget is all but non-existent. Fear not; it is possible to get online for nothing using a site builder. Sure, you’re not going to win any awards, and forget about scalability. But if you need to get a website online fast, site builders are a no-brainer.

In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is booming and dominating virtually every sector, it’s no surprise that its innovative prowess has extended its reach to the design world. From healthcare to finance, transportation to entertainment, AI has carved its mark, revolutionizing industries at an unprecedented pace. Among the many realms it’s reshaping, one stands out as a vibrant canvas for its creative impact—User Interface (UI) design.

UI design, once confined to arranging elements on screens, has now transformed into an artistic tapestry that weaves together aesthetics and functionality. As AI’s influence expands, it brings with it a dynamic wave of change that is propelling design into uncharted territories. The fusion of AI-generated art and UI design is propelling us into a new era—one where design isn’t just visually pleasing but also technologically captivating.

In this unfolding landscape, we find ourselves at the crossroads of innovation and imagination. The partnership between AI and human creativity propels UI design beyond the conventional, giving birth to an exciting revolution. Through this journey, we’ll unveil the seamless integration of AI-generated artistry into UI design, a synergy that amplifies the impact of both realms.

Explore the transformation where art and code converge to reshape design norms. Witness how AI acts as an inspiration and partner, sparking a revolution in UI aesthetics. As we dig deeper, you’ll unveil AI’s impact, redefining the core of design concepts. Brace yourself for an unfolding evolution as AI’s creativity illuminates fresh possibilities for digital interactions, merging innovation and beauty in unprecedented ways.

Unveiling the Dual Nature of AI in UI Design: Ally or Adversary?

The emergence of AI raises a crucial question: should designers greet this evolution with open arms or cautious skepticism? While AI offers immense potential to reshape the design landscape, its impact hinges on a delicate balance of human ingenuity and technological prowess. Let’s navigate through the complexities, exploring the symbiotic relationship between designers and AI and how prudent usage can amplify creativity while also highlighting potential pitfalls.

The Promise of Amplified Creativity

AI’s role as a creative ally is undeniable. It streamlines processes, generates novel ideas, and gives designers a fresh lens to envision and iterate. This partnership has the potential to revolutionize design by freeing up designers’ time for conceptualization and innovation.

The Imperative of Human Intervention

However, AI’s capabilities come with a crucial caveat: the necessity for human intervention. While AI can generate designs, it needs the innate human ability to infuse emotions, cultural nuances, and context into the creative process. Designers wield the power to imbue interfaces with empathy and resonance, ensuring user experiences transcend mere functionality.

From Asset to Liability

The allure of AI-driven efficiency can become a double-edged sword. Relying solely on AI-generated designs risks homogeneity, where interfaces need uniqueness and character. Human intervention prevents UI design from being reduced to a mechanical formula, allowing for tailored solutions that cater to diverse needs.

Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation

AI’s impartiality is only as good as the data it learns from. Unchecked AI can inadvertently perpetuate biases present in the data. Designers play a pivotal role in identifying and rectifying such biases, ensuring that interfaces remain fair, inclusive, and unbiased.

Bridging the Chasm for Positive Impact

Designers who harness AI responsibly bridge the gap between innovation and ethical design. With human insight steering AI’s suggestions and outputs, designers can harness its potential without compromising on the essence of human-centered design.

A Confluence of Creativity

In the end, the harmonious blend of human intuition and AI’s computational prowess can yield groundbreaking results. Designers who wield AI as a complementary tool elevate their craft, pioneering solutions that are efficient, empathetic, and innovative.

The Power of AI-Generated Art in UI Design

The emergence of AI-generated art is a testament to technology’s continuous innovation, far beyond mere automation. It is heralding a transformation in the potential of UI design that reaches uncharted territories, breaking through previous limitations.

Unveiling AI’s Artistic Potential

AI’s foray into art and graphics is genuinely revolutionary. Rather than mere mimicry, AI’s algorithms are dynamic and evolving, transforming data into visually stunning creations. The potential to produce intricate and captivating art is both inspirational and transformative. AI can replicate diverse artistic styles through advanced algorithms, opening up endless avenues of creative exploration.

Shattering Traditional Design Boundaries

AI’s impact on design surpasses aesthetics; it pushes the very boundaries that traditional design struggled to breach. By transcending human limitations, AI accelerates design iterations to unprecedented speeds. This not only challenges designers but empowers them to venture outside their comfort zones. Designers now embrace novel solutions that might have remained undiscovered without AI’s creative partnership.

Harmony Between Machine and Imagination

Vitally, it’s crucial to understand that AI’s role in UI design isn’t to overshadow human creativity but to conduct a harmonious interplay of synergistic capabilities. Operating as a collaborator, AI enhances the creative prowess of designers. By weaving its analytical finesse with human thought processes, AI ignites the flames of innovation. This seamless merger of machine precision and human ingenuity nurtures an environment where ideas flow freely, ultimately giving birth to designs that profoundly connect with users.

Harnessing AI in UI Design: Practical Applications

Incorporating AI into UI design is not just a futuristic concept; it’s a dynamic reality that’s already redefining design processes. Let’s delve into concrete ways AI can be harnessed to enhance UI design and deliver experiences that resonate deeply with users.

Identifying User Patterns and Preferences

AI’s analytical capabilities enable UI designers to gather insights into user behavior. By analyzing patterns and preferences, designers can tailor interfaces to meet user expectations, ensuring a more personalized and engaging experience.

Streamlining Design Iterations

Traditionally, design iterations could be time-consuming. With AI’s rapid generative abilities, designers can explore a multitude of design options in a fraction of the time. This accelerates the ideation process and allows for more creative experimentation.

AI-Enhancing Visual Assets and Content Generation

AI is transforming content and imagery in UI design. Advanced tools now produce AI-generated images and content based on prompts. Unlike standard placeholder materials, these AI-generated responses closely match design intentions. This empowers designers to streamline processes, make informed choices, and elevate the end visualization.

Creating Adaptive Interfaces

AI’s adaptability shines in creating interfaces that evolve based on user interactions. By understanding user intent, AI can dynamically adjust visual elements, layouts, and interactions, ensuring an interface that’s both intuitive and responsive.

Enhancing Accessibility

AI-powered tools can assist in making UI designs more inclusive. By identifying potential accessibility challenges and suggesting improvements, AI ensures that interfaces are usable by a broader range of users, regardless of their abilities.

Generating Contextual Content

AI-generated content can seamlessly integrate with UI design, providing dynamic and relevant information. From personalized recommendations to real-time updates, AI-driven content enhances user engagement and keeps interfaces fresh.

Balancing Consistency and Creativity

AI can assist in maintaining design consistency across various elements while still allowing room for creative expression. This balance ensures that UIs are coherent yet distinctive and visually appealing.

Collaborating with AI

Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that AI isn’t here to replace designers—it’s here to collaborate. By integrating AI as a creative partner, designers can leverage its capabilities to enhance their creative process, experiment with new ideas, and bring innovative designs to life.

Future Prospects and Collaborative Possibilities

As we peer into the future of AI-generated art in UI design, exciting prospects and collaborative possibilities unfold. The integration of AI with design processes has already begun redefining the industry, propelling it into uncharted creative territories. The potential for collaboration between designers and AI algorithms is immense, allowing for the amplification of design ideas and the exploration of unexplored concepts. This collaboration can drive innovation, offering designers new tools and perspectives to create captivating and user-centric experiences.

Challenges and Limitations

Yet, as we embrace the promises of AI-generated art in UI design, we must also address its challenges and limitations. While AI offers efficiency and creativity, concerns about originality, adaptability, and potential biases arise. The need for human intervention to infuse empathy, cultural understanding, and context into the design process is paramount. Ethical considerations and bias mitigation are vital aspects to navigate, ensuring that AI-powered designs remain fair, inclusive, and unbiased.

Conclusion: A Harmonious Symphony of Creativity and Technology

In an era propelled by the momentum of AI’s advancement across industries, the fusion of AI-generated art and UI design stands as an epitome of the dynamic synergy between creativity and technology. This discourse has navigated the intricate relationship between AI and designers, underscoring AI’s dual potential as both an ally and a challenge. It has delved into the revolutionary potential of AI-generated art in UI design, spotlighting its capacity to elevate visual components and redefine user interactions.

Through judicious harnessing of AI’s capabilities, designers find themselves at the vanguard of a paradigm shift—a convergence of innovation and aesthetics. Through collaboration with AI, designers can amplify their creative voices, elevate their craftsmanship, and pioneer solutions that exude efficiency, empathy, and innovation. This narrative has illuminated a pathway ahead, one where technology and human ingenuity harmonize seamlessly, promising a horizon where UI design flourishes in unprecedented dimensions.

Featured image by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

The post The Creative Revolution: Elevating UI Design with AI-Generated Artistry appeared first on noupe.

Elon Musk just added grungy white stains to the X logo. How long will this one last before it heads to the chopping block?

Neville Brody, an iconic graphic designer, recently collaborated with Nike to design a modular, industrial typography for the England Women’s Football Kit.

Have you ever wondered why some ecommerce sites have you effortlessly gliding from page to page, product to cart, while others feel like trudging through digital quicksand? The answer lies in design.

Let’s start with a fairly common example of a hero component on the homepage of Drupal’s demo installation of the Umami theme.

The image in this hero component is loaded by CSS via the background-image property. In order for the browser to display the image, it has a fairly long chain of dependencies:

1. Download the HTML.
2. Download and parse the CSS.
3. Reconcile the CSS ruleset with the DOM.
4. Download the image.
5. Display the image.

While browsers are generally pretty fast, these steps still take time to load, typically in seconds, and even longer on slower, high-latency network connections. And because this image is within the initial viewport, it’s very noticeable.

So noticeable, in fact, that Core Web Vitals has a metric all about it called Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This metric measures the time it takes, in seconds, to render the largest image or text block that is visible on the initial load. We can test for LCP in a number of ways. The following screenshot is taken from a test I ran through WebPageTest, resulting in an LCP of 2.4 seconds.

The image file used for the hero component’s background is the ninth item in the report, taking 1,041 milliseconds to even begin the download.

In case you’re wondering, 2.4 seconds is not great. That’s practically an eternity when talking about page speed performance. And since the image file used for the background appears to be making up about 50% of that time, it’s a prime target for optimization.

Here’s how we are approaching it.

Step 1: Use An Tag Instead Of A Background Image

To avoid the five-step dependency chain I outlined above, we want to prevent loading the image with CSS. Instead, we’re going to load the image as a standard HTML tag in the markup.

This allows the browser’s preload scanner to detect and download the image early in the process — something it cannot parse from a CSS file. The preload scanner does pretty much what you think it does: it scans the HTML as it’s still being downloaded and starts to pull down additional assets that it thinks are important.

How do we use an HTML as a replacement for a CSS background-image? We’re unable to simply drop an image in the markup and use it as a true background, at least in the CSS sense. Instead, we have to establish a container element — let’s give it a class name of .hero — and position the image in a way that stacks on top of it, and subsequently, allow other elements such as the hero content to stack on top of it. This gives us the illusion of a background image.

This requires us to use absolute positioning in CSS. This takes the image out of the normal document flow, which is a fancy way of saying that the elements surrounding it act as if it’s not there. The image is there, of course, but its physical dimensions are ignored, allowing elements to flow right on top of it rather than around it.

.hero {
  position: relative; /* Anchor the image */
}

.hero img {
  position: absolute;
  inset: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

This works! The element now stacks on top of the .hero container. But now we have a couple of new issues that need to be addressed.

The first is that the image is squished and distorted. You might think this is a bug, but we’ve set the image to take up width: 100% and height: 100% of the .hero container, and it is merely adjusting its aspect ratio to the aspect ratio of the container, as it’s being told to do.

If we were still loading the image with the CSS background-image property, we could fix this by setting background-size: cover on the image. But we don’t get that luxury when working with HTML images.

Fortunately, the object-fit property can solve this for us. It works pretty similarly to the background-size property and actually takes the same cover keyword as a value. We set that on the image in CSS:

.hero {
  position: relative; /* Anchor the image */
}

.hero img {
  position: absolute;
  inset: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  object-fit: cover; /* Prevents squishing */
}

This brings us to the second issue we introduced when we applied absolute positioning to the image. Remember the content with the cool pink button that sat on top of the background image in the first screenshot at the beginning of the article? The image is completely covering it. It’s there, just not seen beneath the absolutely-positioned image.

The “problem” is that we get a stacking context anytime we explicitly declare a non-static position on an element. The image is taken out of the normal flow but is still visible even as elements that follow it in the markup flow right through it. As such, the content elements flow under the image and are hidden from view. I say “problem” in quotes because, again, this is expected behavior that comes by explicitly declaring position: absolute in CSS.

The trick? We can give the .hero element’s content container its own stacking context. We won’t use absolute positioning, however, because we want it to remain in the normal document flow. Otherwise, it, too, would obscure its surrounding elements.

That’s where setting a relative position — position: relative — comes into play. Elements come with position: static by default. By when we declare position: relative, it produces a stacking context but also keeps the element within the normal flow.

.hero {
  position: relative; /* Anchor the image */
}

.hero img {
  position: absolute;
  inset: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  object-fit: cover; /* Prevents squishing */
}

.hero__content {
  position: relative; /* Adds a stacking context */
}

Now the content sits properly on top of the image as though the image were a true background:

I’ll note that your mileage may vary depending on the order of elements inside the parent container. You may find yourself needing to set the element’s level in the stacking context using z-index.

Step 2: Use A Modern Image Format

The hero banner looks correct now, but we still have a bit of work to do. The current image is a highly-optimized JPG file, which isn’t horrible, but we can do better. The new-ish WebP image format is supported by all modern browsers and typically comes in at a very small file size. Let’s use that instead of a standard JPG.

After configuring Drupal to serve WebP image formats, we can see the new image size is reduced by 10% with no noticeable loss of quality!

Note: In many cases, the file size will be reduced substantially more than that (frequently more than 50%), but in our case, the source image was already fairly optimized.

Step 3: Use Responsive Images

We now have the image being downloaded immediately, and we’re also using the new WebP image format, which can save up to 50% on the file size. But we’re still not done, as the same image is being served for every screen size. If we serve smaller images to smaller screen sizes, the image will download even faster to those devices. To solve this, we’ll implement responsive images.

Responsive images have been supported in browsers for a long time. At its core, the markup contains paths to multiple images, and information on which screen sizes to serve each lets the browser know when to display. This enables the browser to automatically pull down the images that are sized appropriately for the screen size.

We set this up using the element, and it looks something like this:

<picture>
  <source srcset="/img-path_wide/veggie-pasta-bake-hero-umami.jpg.webp 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1400px)" type="image/webp" width="3000" height="1285">
  <source srcset="/img-path_large/veggie-pasta-bake-hero-umami.jpg.webp 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1400px)" type="image/webp" width="1440" height="617">
  <source srcset="/img-path_medium/veggie-pasta-bake-hero-umami.jpg.webp 1x" media="all and (min-width: 500px) and (max-width: 800px)" type="image/webp" width="1200" height="514">
  <source srcset="/img-path_tiny/veggie-pasta-bake-hero-umami.jpg.webp 1x" media="all" type="image/webp" width="500" height="214">
  <img src="/img-oath_medium/veggie-pasta-bake-hero-umami.jpg.webp" width="1200" height="514" alt="Mouth watering vegetarian pasta bake with rich tomato sauce and cheese toppings">
</picture>

Note: Drupal supports responsive images out of the box. If you’re CMS or framework does not, there are services such as Cloudinary that can handle this for you (for a fee, of course).

There’s Still More To Do

We made significant improvements and improved the LCP by 58%, from 2.4s to 1.4s!

But there’s still more to do. Yet another, newer image format called AVIF can help reduce our image file sizes by another 20–30%. Similarly, there’s the new fetchpriority HTML attribute for images.

It’s worth mentioning that the attribute is still considered “experimental” at the moment, and browser support isn’t currently all the way there as I’m writing this.

That said, we’re currently working on a setting in the Drupal admin UI that adds fetchpriority to images, and when that lands, we’ll use it to inform the browser of the relative priority of the image (which in this case would be equal to high).

Wrapping Up

In this article, we identified, measured, and fixed a very common performance issue, not only in Drupal but in everyday front-end work.

Similar to accessibility, I find the biggest obstacle to making web performance better is indifference.

Web developers should learn to use various testing tools such as Lighthouse and WebPageTest. We should learn common metrics, such as Time to First Byte, LCP, and other web vitals. And most of all, we need to care. There is a wealth of information on websites to help guide you along your learning path.

Additional Resources

• Web Vitals (web.dev)
• Largest Contentful Paint (web.dev)
• “Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study,” Barry Pollard
• “Core Web Vitals Tools To Boost Your Web Performance Scores,” Zara Cooper
• “A Quick Overview of object-fit and object-position,” Robin Rendle

What do you get when you cross TikTok’s swiping with Spotify’s Discover feature? Enter Samples – YouTube Music’s new one-tap tool for finding new sounds.

Dear AI is an artificial intelligence program that enables users to create thoughtful, handwritten letters for their loved ones. Is it a must-have timesaver or a worrying sign that we’ve delved too far into the doldrums of impersonal machine-generated content?