Gratitude can change your life

A grateful heart is a contented heart. A contented heart is a simple heart. And a simple heart leads to a simplified life.

Gratitude opens the door to simplicity. A person who is grateful for the things they own will care for them, enjoy them, and waste less energy seeking more. They will experience fulfillment in the gifts they already possess rather than looking outside themselves for more.

In contrast, those who can find gratitude in their current existence will be less influenced by those empty promises.

How can we find gratitude in a world that seeks to destroy it?


1. Intentionally choose it. Gratitude will never be a result of your next purchase, success, or accomplishment. It is available in your heart right now. And you will never find gratitude in life until you intentionally decide to choose it.

2. Count your blessings. A new day, a warm bed, a loving spouse, a child in your life, a unique personality, or a special talent… You have wonderful things in your life already. Gratitude quickly sets in when we begin to spend a quiet moment each day remembering them. This practice alone has the potential to change your heart and life immeasurably.

3. Have a morning gratitude session. Take one minute in the morning (make it a daily ritual) to think of the people who have done something nice for you, to think of all the things in your life you’re grateful for. You won’t get to everything in one minute, but it’s enough. And it will instantly make your day better, and help you start your day off right. Can you think of a better use of one minute?

4. When you’re having a hard day … make a gratitude list. We all have those bad days sometimes. We are stressed out from work. We get yelled at by someone. We lose a loved one. We hurt a loved one. We lose a contract or do poorly on a project. One of the things that can make a bad day much better is making a list of all the things you’re thankful for. There are always things to be thankful for — loved ones, health, having a job, having a roof over your head and clothes on your back, life itself.

5. When you face a major challenge, be grateful for it. Many people will see something difficult as a bad thing. If something goes wrong, it’s a reason to complain, it’s a time of self-pity. That won’t get you anywhere. Instead, learn to be grateful for the challenge — it’s an opportunity to grow, to learn, to get better at something. This will transform you from a complainer into a positive person who only continues to improve. People will like you better and you’ll improve your career. Not too shabby.

6. Instead of looking at what you don’t have, look at what you do have. Have you ever looked around you and bemoaned how little you have? How the place you live isn’t your dream house, or the car you drive isn’t as nice as you’d like, or your peers have cooler gadgets or better jobs? If so, that’s an opportunity to be grateful for what you already have. It’s easy to forget that there are billions of people worse off than you — who don’t have much in the way of shelter or clothes, who don’t own a car and never will, who don’t own a gadget or even know what one is, who don’t have a job at all or only have very menial, miserable jobs in sweatshop conditions. Compare your life to these people’s lives, and be grateful for the life you have. And realize that it’s already more than enough, that happiness is not a destination — it’s already here.

7. Open your eyes to those with less. Almost half the world, over three billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to clean water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Let those facts sink in for just a moment—and slowly allow gratitude and a desire to become part of the solution to take their place.

Working With Color in Adobe Photoshop

Any artist will tell you that the use of color is a major component of the design process, regardless of the medium. Digital art and photography are no exceptions. Color can be powerful and evocative, but only if you know how to use it properly.

For quiz

How to achieve goals

Most of us are a bit flawed in how we pursue our goals. We think that setting intentions and taking steps toward them is enough, but it’s not.

The basic principle to understand when doing this exercise is that in order to create anything new, we must remove the obstacles that are in the way.

Making a list of what we want is the easy part. Undoing blocks and then doing the work to co-create it is actually what brings it into physical form.

So what is in your way?

Obstacles and blocks include: fear, limiting beliefs, perceived lack of resources, time, attachment to other’s opinions, unforgiven issues from the past, toxic situations or relationships, and so on.

Once you identify your blocks, make an action plan for how you are going to address them head on.

Often the biggest obstacle is YOU.

You can be critical and downright mean to yourself. You often compare yourself or doubt yourself. You allow yourself to indulge in habits that you know are not moving you in the direction of your dreams. You lack faith and don’t trust the Uni-verse. You are waiting not to be scared to take a step forward. You spend more time looking at what’s wrong with you versus what’s downright awesome about you.

Does any of this sound like you? Even if you are this way sometimes, it is damaging. So as soon as you catch yourself in the act of self-sabotage, inwardly say, “I forgive myself for forgetting who I really am!” and get out of your own freaking way!

10 Illustrator Tools

In this article, we’re going to talk about the top ten most useful tools in Adobe Illustrator. Whether you’re into icon design, illustrations or any other craft, you’ll definitely want to read this article, since you’ll learn something new and interesting about the software that you use on a daily basis.

1.  The Ruler
2.  The Blend tool
3.  The offset path
4.  The Clipping mask
5.  The artboard panel
6.  The layer panel
7.  The pathfinder panel
8.  The align panel
9.  The grid
10.  Snap to grid/ Pixel grid

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QUICK TIPS The Flexbox Reading List: Techniques and Tools

Flexbox gives us a new kind of control over our layouts, making coding challenges that were hard or impossible to solve with CSS alone straightforward and intuitive. It provides us with the means to build grids that are flexible and aware of dynamic content, and thus, give us the freedom to focus on the creation process instead of hacking our way towards a layout

To give you a head start into Flexbox and provide you with ideas on how to use it to master common coding challenges, we have collected tips, tricks, and tools that help you get the most out of its power already today. The list is by no means complete but includes the resources which we found helpful and useful.

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Responsive Image Breakpoints

In our responsive layouts, breakpoints refer to the viewport sizes at which we make changes to the layout or functionality of a page. These typically map to media queries.

Responsive image breakpoints are similar, but slightly different. When I think about image breakpoints, I’m trying to answer two questions:

• How many image sources do I need to provide to cover the continuum of sizes that this image will be used for?
• Where and when should the various image sources be used?

The answers to these questions lead to different breakpoints than the criteria we use to select breakpoints for our responsive layouts. For our layouts, We resize the browser until the page looks bad and then BOOOOM, we need a breakpoint

The main reason why we need multiple image sources has nothing to do with where the images look bad. We want to provide multiple image sources because of performance concerns, different screen densities, etc.

So we can’t simply reuse our responsive layout breakpoints for our images.

Breakpoints are the point a which your sites content will respond to provide the user with the best possible layout to consume the information.

When you first begin to work with Responsive Design you will define your breakpoints at the exact device widths that you are looking to target. Most often these are the smart phone (usually the iPhone at 320px and 480px), the tablet (usually the iPad at 768px and 1024px) and finally anything above 1024px.

Wrong!

You're approaching this in the wrong way.

Instead of being concerned with device breakpoints the best practice is to design for your smallest viewport first. As you expand that view there will come a point at which the design looks shit terrible. This is where you add a break point.

Sass_Ampersand

The & is an extremely useful feature in Sass (and Less). It's used when nesting. It can be a nice time-saver when you know how to use it, or a bit of a time-waster when you're struggling and could have written the same code in regular CSS.

Let's see if we can really understand it.

Basic Nesting

SCSS
.parent{
  .child{}
}

CSS
.parent .child{}

You can nest as deep as you'd like, but it's a good practice to keep it only a level or two to prevent overly specific selectors (which are less useful and harder to override).

Add another class

The & comes in handy when you're nesting and you want to create a more specific selector, like an element that has *both* of two classes, like this:

SCSS
.some-class{
  &.another-class{}
}

CSS
.some-class.another-class{}

The & always refers to the parent selector when nesting. Think of the & as being removed and replaced with the parent selector.

"Ahh" moment

SCSS
.parent{
  & .child{}
}

.parent{
  .child{}
}

CSS
.parent .child{}

The example with the & isn't anything different than the example without the&. Nesting without the & is shorthand for nesting with it. We can think of the &as a mechanism that allows us to place the parent selector wherever we need it in our child selector. It allows us to nest with alterations. Let's look at some more examples.

Using the & with pseudo classes

You can write pseudo classes on a class in a much less repetitive way with the &:

SCSS
.button{
  &:visited{}
  &:hover{}
  &:active{}
}

CSS
.button:visited{}
.button:hover{}
.button:active{}

Using the & with >, + and ~

SCSS
.button{
  & > span{}
  & + span{}
  & ~ span{}
}

CSS
.button > span{}
.button + span{}
.button ~ span{}

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