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7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design

It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.

This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.

For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”: design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).

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The Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release The Leaf Fall: a social icon set. This set contains 11 social icons, designed in an autumn-style. The set includes icons for Twitter, Technorati, RSS, Reddit, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in the .png-format in various resolutions. This icon set is intended to be used by bloggers. It was designed by Templates.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Celebration Of Smoke Photography and Smoke Art

Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.

In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.

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15 Useful Batch Image Processors

Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks.

With batch image processing, you can specify a size or file type, and then a script runs to convert the images. You can process hundreds or thousands of images with just a few clicks. And nearly every image processor comes with a unique feature set.

Image processors are worth their weight in gold if you’re a designer or developer spending a good chunk of time converting images by hand in Photoshop. Let's take a look at 15 useful batch image processors for both Mac and PC.

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Fresh Job Openings On Smashing Jobs

The web-industry is a fickle environment. Projects come and go, clients make promises and never return, raising hopes and breaking deadlines. Hence, it's always worth to check out our job board Smashing Jobs. You can just click on "Jobs" in the horizontal navbar at the top or use the widget in the sidebar.

As an additional service for job seekers and employers we present the latest job entries. Perhaps there is a freelance gig or a new job opening that will literally smash into your life.

Dozens of thousands of creative talents are visiting Smashing Magazine daily. It is very likely that one of them is just the person you are keeping your job opening for. Posting a job opening on Smashing Jobs is easy and cost-efficient. Don’t miss the opportunity to find a creative bright mind or a promising job!

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Dellipack 2: A Free Icon Set

Today we are glad to release The DelliPack 2! icon set. This second set of "delicious icons" contains 15 icons: a build icon, a home icon, an interact icon, a monitor icon, a pen icon, a phone book icon and other icons which can be useful for both corporate and personal projects. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever. You can also take a look at the Dellipack 1: A Free Icon Set

The icons are available in the .png-format in the resolutions 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px. This icon set was designed by Wendell Fernandes and is now released as a gift for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Behind the Design: 5 Stories of Great Inspiration

We grow our creative talents through experience: whether it's learning from a veteran designer about how things came to be or finding fresh delight in Smashing Magazine posts, no great artist exists without inspiration. Famously declared in reference to scientific progress: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants", said Isaac Newton.

The same is true of aesthetic and philosophical flourishings. By better understanding where we've come from and cherishing the brilliant minds who have come before us, we have a greater understanding of creative possibilities. Here are some design tales that have made for a substantially richer, more beautiful world. All are worth knowing — and moving forth from.

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