The <hr>-Contest Results – Download your fresh <hr>-line now!
Three weeks ago we have encouraged our readers to participate in our <hr>-contest by designing beautiful and creative horizontal lines. It was necessary, since this design-element was slowly disappearing and was often neglected in web design. But it is going to change now. We have received 1290 images and source-files from 384 designers across the globe. The result is an impressive collection of horizontal lines that designers can use for free without any restrictions whatsoever.
Many entries contained not only images, but also source-files, mostly for Photoshop or Illustrator. You can use them if you want to modify a design for your projects. For this purpose we packed these files in one .zip-archive with all source-files (109 files, 25 Mb). Of course, it would be better to provide the link to a .zip-package next to each of the designs presented below, but it would take many hours of work which we can actually use in a more effective way. We can not guarantee that all images in the .zip-package are correct as we haven’t tested all of them.
Unfortunately, some entries could not be considered for the contest. They didn’t meet our requirements, were too big or unusable. It was important for us that these files could be used in projects beyond the scope of our contest.
The BIG Gallery of <hr>-Graphics
Some ideas were more popular than the other ones. For instance, a zipper, flowers and ornaments, pencils, Pac-Man, birds, scissors. You can see almost everything from geometrics designs to oriental designs. Our smashing readers show that even a small tiny line can become a piece of art. For some users it may be too much, but here the idea counts most. And you can use as a starting point for horizontal lines in your projects. Or you can use some minimalistic designs. Most designs were black/white, and few of them were pretty colorful.
Colorful Lines
Andrea Baroni
Ideas under the design: mmm….well…starting from a pencil sketch I then created the vectors in Illustrator and refined them in Photoshop.

Johannes Aagaard

Ratko Horvat

Lewis Keogh
"Igloo eyes" – Odd alien type eyes that resemble mulitcoloured igloos. Could be adapted to match the colour scheme of a site/blog.
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Ray Pham
Lewis Keogh
"Noah’s arc" – As the name suggests.
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Sandeep Singh

Isfahan Ashraf
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Darren Northcott

Darren Northcott
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Johannes Aagard
The ideas behind my 3 designs are mainly fresh and happy colours, while I love fresh colours. And I’m sure lots of other also does. But also 2 of them are a little unusual, and would fit nicely in a creative blog (in my opinion)

Jehzeel Laurente
I love to experiment and explore the astounding features of Photoshop. In my green hr entry, I tried using pen tool to create bent vectors and combine it with other objects to see what’s the outcome. In my black entry, I just tried to make it simple and elegant by creating circles, lines and label it with binary code. I think it looks boring but it’s simple and clean, perfect for websites and blogs that want simple and clean horizontal divider.

Jehzeel Laurente

Jehzeel Laurente

Cameron Queen

Jade Gordon
I was eager to try out some recently learned techniques in Photoshop. I’ve been falling for patterns and textures, and fine brush details.
Heather van de Mark
HR Ransom – Cutout letters create an hr divider that is funky and original. It is an array of colors and yet they all complement each other. This is definitely for an alternative blog/web site with humor and edge. I created multiple different backgrounds with jagged edges, so it looks as if they really came from the printed page. The graphic can easily be manipulated to cut the divider to make it longer or shorter or to rearrange the letter order. I didn’t want it to spell anything because that would be distracting.

Abhijit Sagade
I have tried to relate HR with real life observations and have tried to create simplistic visuals out of those ideas.
Abhijit Sagade
Joel Lueck

Alistair Symonds

Mihai Petica
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Vincent Fromaget

Carina Kornowski

Yann Guerin

Olivier Courbet
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Jeronimo Strehl
This is a shoooooooooooooort break.

Manasa Malipeddi
(the lamp) The idea of this lamp sprouted out of my own wishful thinking. I always wished (and still do) that I had better stuff to write about in my blog; posts that would enlighten somebody, and that is how I thought of a lamp representing enlightenment.

Manasa Malipeddi
(the cat)

Manasa Malipeddi
(the frightened girl) This was what I wanted to do when I realised that my new haircut looked aweful – hide behind a divider!

Manasa Malipeddi
(the knot)

Dennis Meene

Dennis Meene

Ray Pham
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Geo Sukarno

Priscilla Louzada
Guilherme Baiao

Guilherme Baiao

Ardy
I have designed the HR keeping in mind the theme of nature and subtle relaxing ideas (duck in water, clouds, leaves, etc). I feel that these break the monotony of using typical HRs with straight lines. The colors used are also soft and comforting to the latest in designs. I hope you like them. We might plan on making use of the ‘cloudy HR’ within our own website which is currently undergoing major revamping. You can see a general design idea at www.anautix.com/v2

Vlad Mocanu

Ardy

Livia Radvanski

Reginald Balanga
a set of hr graphics with a theme of "Baby’s Clothesline". Inspired by my 1 year old baby boy. The graphics are in png format and is best used with white background.

Reginald Balanga

Reginald Balanga

Andrea Baroni

Peter Dzaluk
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Peter Dzaluk
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Fabienne Curty
A power cable desperately reaching for its plug.

Ardy
I have designed the HR keeping in mind the theme of nature and subtle relaxing ideas (duck in water, clouds, leaves, etc). I feel that these break the monotony of using typical HRs with straight lines. The colors used are also soft and comforting to the latest in designs. I hope you like them. We might plan on making use of the ‘cloudy HR’ within our own website which is currently undergoing major revamping. You can see a general design idea at www.anautix.com/v2

Milan van Bruggen
For the creatives: A colourful ruler with crayons.
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David Laplante

Valeria Kuzminska

Valeria Kuzminska

Johannes Aagaard
The ideas behind my 3 designs are mainly fresh and happy colours, while I love fresh colours. And I’m sure lots of other also does. But also 2 of them are a little unusual, and would fit nicely in a creative blog (in my opinion)

Kyle Theisen
All of the designs were inspired by CMYK – nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to create something very simple, yet modern and fun.
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Steve Lam

Ross Cooper

Ricardo Mestre

Tamer Yilmaz
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Playing with <hr>…
Some designers decided to use classic motifs.
Milan van Bruggen
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Nathan Lyle
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Björn Rohles
After doing some research on web standards, I was surprised that none of the sites I found actually included code to create a visual representation of the topic of "web standards". I imagine it would be easy to work with the text used to code a site for design purposes (for instance, using the text "div" in the background of divs). This hr is a start to realize this approach.
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Dariusz Rusin
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Vernon Kesner
Driving force behind this idea was actually was a recent quarter (I think it was a quarter) I saw. On close inspection, there was actually inscription going around the outer ridge of the quarter. I actually think these turned out really cool.
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Vernon Kesner
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Ricardo Mestre

Vane Kosturanov
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Mark MacDonald
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Drawn Lines
Priyadarshi Kunal

Chris McLeod

Yiyi Zhou
I’ve always like hand-drawn designs with lots of color. The first two are meant to look somewhat like beads on a string, and the second two are just meant to be fun designs of an owl and snails.

Yiyi Zhou
Jehzeel Laurente
My pink entry was inspired with pink dirty-like brushes and cartoony buildings. My blue entry was inspired with simple blue lines in different thickness to make it look stylish, simple and creative. And my last entry was the orange arrows from splashed paint. This entry was some kinda accident. I just played around with the paint splatter brush then suddenly arrows appear in my mind and I included it.. and… I’m somewhat satisfied of the outcome.

Vernon Kesner
Driving force behind this idea was actually was a recent quarter (I think it was a quarter) I saw. On close inspection, there was actually inscription going around the outer ridge of the quarter. I actually think these turned out really cool.

Vernon Kesner

Sandeep Singh

Stig Greve
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Dominik Felber

Dominik Felber

Eric White

Brian Litzinger
I didn’t have a lot of time to invest in making these HRs, so the first idea that came to mind is what you see. I have no clue if this has been done before…

Brian Litzinger

Brian Litzinger

Abhijit Kumar

Prijadarshi Kunal

Prijadarshi Kunal

Jeronimo Strehl
No, this isn’t the end – just a little break…

Jeronimo Strehl
Ok – this is the end, the post is finished – so, get unppluged and go outside.

Cheng Kam Wang

Thin Lines
These ones can be used for body copy.
Eva Hellmann
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Eva Hellmann
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Christoph Bach

Zsolt Kocsmarszky

Christina Böhme

Petar Pavlov
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Christoph Bach

Cameron Queen
This is just a design I’ve been playing around with for my own site and thought I’d interpret it for this competition as it’s an avenue I haven’t explored with my ‘donut’ graphics until now.

Arthur Rehm

Aren Lavilla

Vane Kosturanov
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Nour Malaeb
Equalizer: Another musical-themed design for a more minimalist blog.
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Nour Malaeb
Moustache: Just a fun design for hair-themed blogs, or perhaps a blog for gentlemen. Or the Monopoly guy.
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Amer Aidi
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Dariusz Rusin

Dariusz Rusin

Black & White
Jehzeel Laurente
I love to experiment and explore the astounding features of Photoshop. In my green hr entry, I tried using pen tool to create bent vectors and combine it with other objects to see what’s the outcome. In my black entry, I just tried to make it simple and elegant by creating circles, lines and label it with binary code. I think it looks boring but it’s simple and clean, perfect for websites and blogs that want simple and clean horizontal divider. My pink entry was inspired with pink dirty-like brushes and cartoony buildings. My blue entry was inspired with simple blue lines in different thickness to make it look stylish, simple and creative. And my last entry was the orange arrows from splashed paint. This entry was some kinda accident. I just played around with the paint splatter brush then suddenly arrows appear in my mind and I included it.. and… I’m somewhat satisfied of the outcome.

Wojciech Slowacki
The birds sitting on a wire are a common sight when you travel between one place and another, so you can say the image of birds separates different places. That’s why I thought it could also separate content as a <hr /> background

Wojciech Slowacki
A cowboy riding off into the sunset – thats a good scene for an ending, so I thought it would be a fitting image for an ending of a post on some blog.

Nathan Lyle
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Alistair Symonds
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Richard Stellmach

Vlad Mocanu
The general ideea of my images is a modest desire to reinvent the magic of 2D geometry. We live in a world that has forgotten the place it rose from … unfortunately …

Dennis Meene

Jon Lucas
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Nathan Kelly

Dominik Felber

Vane Konsturanov
While I was reading the <hr/> contest post on Smashing a couple of ideas came on my mind. This is what came out.

Marcin Dembek

Michael Koloch
A tribute to osvaldo cavandoli’s "la linea" cartoon i watched since i was 3 or 4 years old.

Loveena Rayan
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Emanuel Felipe

Anggun Pribadi

Amber Slooten
The reason I created a <hr /> like this, was because I personally like silhouettes of women. I thought it was a lot of refreshment. There wansn’t really any inspiration source: It just hit me.

Jens Fiedler
The first designs was forced through an old Mockup for my own portfolio, i liked the idea of usual things for the website functions, so i wanted to make them all look "real"… and the contest, reminds of it, so i made an zipper to make an remindable hr graphic.

Olivier Courbet

Andrea Baroni
Ideas under the design: mmm….well…starting from a pencil sketch I then created the vectors in Illustrator and refined them in Photoshop.
This three themes are pretty naturalistic and on the cute-side I think…
Nothing so risky in the end, but I hope enjoyable and unusual.

Fabienne Curty
A horizontal crack in a wall, with a pair of scary eyes staring out – this <hr /> would fit into grungy layouts.

Fabienne Curty
A horizontally torn paperstrip that’s being held together by staples and clips – this <hr /> would fit into papery layouts.

Sonali Vora

Jim Hargreaves
Elegance meets wit…a classic design for journalistic blogging.
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Jim Hargreaves
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Jim Hargreaves
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Jim Hargreaves
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Stephan Hilbelink
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Stephan Hilbelink
Daan Weijers
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Giacomo Boccardo
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Ehren Harber

Ehren Harber
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Mario Santos
My inspiration on the firts model/set is to have an end identifier on each part of site/text, nothing like a bar code.

Mario Santos

Abstract and Creative Ideas
Was nicht in die vorigen Rubriken passte…
Cornelius Dorgan
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Lewis Keogh
"Contemporary bubbles" – Witches cauldron with a modern twist.
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Lewis Keogh
"What now" – Working along the lines of, now that the article above has finished what is to follow – as if a line hr break could think.

Rob MacKay
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Casey Smith

Elena Plyusnina
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Gavin Steele
My clean and simple designs…. its about the content, as a decoration the Hr should not draw the eye away from the content.
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Tiffany Pilgrim
This a play-off of the classic ornate divider, but this time hand sketched and with the pencil shavings left behind.

Zivko Condiv

Francesca Culatti
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Francesca Culatti
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Abhijit Sagade
I have tried to relate HR with real life observations and have tried to create simplistic visuals out of those ideas.
Abhijit Sagade
Ratko Horvat

Dennis Meene

Ratko Horvat

Tobias Goth
So what drove me to do make this blood dripping <HR>? My addiction with the Showtime tv-series Dexter of course. I’m a sucker for the intro that rolls at the beginning of every episode. Here’s my adaptation of it into a horizontal ruler.

Alex Holt
Is a background image that should be right aligned…
Subtle, stacked paper design to break the page elegantly.
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Tammy Hart
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Tammy Hart
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Vane Konsturanov
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Vane Konsturanov
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Vane Konsturanov
Lance Gililand

Lance Gililand
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Aren Lavilla

Ehren Harber

Nathan Kelly

Regina Silva

Rubens Cantuni
it’s inspired by the fable "Le petit poucet" bu Charles Perrault. This lil kid leaves pebbles behind is walk to find the way back to home, until one day he can’t find any pebbles so he left crumbs, but birds ate them all…

Rubens Cantuni
a ninja running fast leave a trail of dust behind him

Rubens Cantuni
realistic tear repaired with sticky-tape and staples.

Charles Bamam
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Guilherme Baiao
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Guilherme Baiao

Katya Shulzhenko
Text-style divider says "this is the end" without using brain

Stephan Hilbelink
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Fouad Badawy
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Alex Souto
My theme for the competition is the mouse! This terrible but necessary element of those working on the computer.
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Prijadarshi Kunal

Sergio Ruiz

Fabienne Curty
ECG – The typical ECG measuring curve, spiced up with a cute heart in the center.

Carina Kornowski

Anne Douglas
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Anca Holostencu
During the creation of the HR lines, I thought about fluid shapes and a subtle blending in the overall page design. The lines are meant to incite the reader and make her/him complete the nice feeling regarding what she/he read so far and continue with the next chapter.

Victor Fedyuk

Joro Yordanov
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Ardy
I have designed the HR keeping in mind the theme of nature and subtle relaxing ideas (duck in water, clouds, leaves, etc). I feel that these break the monotony of using typical HRs with straight lines. The colors used are also soft and comforting to the latest in designs. I hope you like them. We might plan on making use of the ‘cloudy HR’ within our own website which is currently undergoing major revamping.

Maria Paula Figueroa
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Adrian Pauly
hr-branch was more of a decorative approach, taking the usual decorative squiggles as a parting point, but rendering it as a much more natural organic element.

Mihai Petica

Thank you!
We would like to express sincere gratitude to each of designers who participated in our contest! Further contest are already on their way. Please stay tuned.
So who is the winner of the contest?
We selected 25 designs which we liked most. Of course, the choice is subjective, but we had to choose the best ones. Please don’t feel angry if you have some other opinion.
Each design has a number assigned to it. Everybody can vote for his or her favourite design. You decide who is the winner of our contest and who will be awarded with a Wacom Intuos3 9X12 USB Tablet displayed below. The poll will be closed in 4 days. The design with most votes will be awarded with the prize.

25 Finalists
1

2

3

4

5
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6

7

8
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9

10

11
12

13
14

15

16

17

18
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19
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20

21

22

23

24
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25

Vote for your favourite design!


Jason
September 9th, 2008 2:06 pmWe don’t see all parts of the HR like the #3, #14, #22 … this is very sad because these HR loose style without it ..
pickupjojo
September 9th, 2008 2:18 pmI don’t really know but I think the #8 is really fun (even if the #7 looks really cool).
Thanks for sharing your great work. :)
neyazsak
September 9th, 2008 2:22 pmi like these lines.Very very beautiful.maybe i can use it
zapinek
September 9th, 2008 2:23 pmimressive ! Thank you all for giving me those lines, hehe :)
kocsmy
September 9th, 2008 2:24 pmi just say: wao!
Silvia
September 9th, 2008 2:28 pmHi!
Are those all of the lines you received? Or did you just uploaded the ones you thought where best?
I can’t see any of mine and I’m concerned that you might have not received them. =S
Good luck finalists! =D
silver sova
September 9th, 2008 2:29 pmThis is seriously weird. The submission under #7 had 39 votes when I started reading this entry and by the time I had scrolled down and up again (took about 30 seconds) it already had 43 votes. And this does not look as cool as some other hr lines..
I am not suggesting anything + am I did not submit anything myself, so I am not trying to bash competition, but still.. weird, as it is clearly not SO great piece.
Andrea Pelizzardi
September 9th, 2008 2:40 pmWhere’s mine!?
O_O
Jason
September 9th, 2008 2:40 pmI agree that some of them aren’t so great … but this is personal choice, so vote and we’ll see what people really think ! The #7 is not so bad ..
Jhack
September 9th, 2008 2:44 pmIn my opinion the HRs you chose for the “25 contest” are quite horrible and/or old style, while I prefer many of the others.
I really don’t understand your criterion.
Jason
September 9th, 2008 2:45 pmI have to agree with Jhack ..
Ralph
September 9th, 2008 2:46 pmYeah, I agree with you Silver. Its really not good, yet it’s in the lead…
Pacman ftw
someone v.friendly :)
September 9th, 2008 2:47 pmvery baaaaaaaaaaaad choices ,
most of them are stolen .
i won’t vote on this rubbish..
christos
September 9th, 2008 2:49 pmsilver sova your comment is one of the most depressing things iv read recently, ts ts ts.
grats to all for those beautiful artworks
Jhack
September 9th, 2008 2:53 pm@someone v.friendly :): if you think that most of them are stolen, please post the links where we can find them, but before you should check if the websites you are referring to belong to the authors of the lines :).
Rubens
September 9th, 2008 2:56 pmwell, I’m a finalist… I’ll never win, but it’s ok… :D
Mike Smith
September 9th, 2008 3:03 pmwow. AWESOME work. I chose #7 :)
davidope
September 9th, 2008 3:06 pmit seems like i was rejected. anyway I would be very happy if at least one human on earth would use one of them once in the time, so: my conest entry – source files are also linked
grats to the nice works:)
Paul
September 9th, 2008 3:31 pmI love Ray Pham’s parked sneakers. nice little statement
gene
September 9th, 2008 3:31 pmQuestion to SVEN, were HRs done in pencil out of the question? or were they supposed to be imported and vectorized?
Joana
September 9th, 2008 3:36 pmI think you should random the poll options. I don´t know, but it seems to me the ones from the “top” are most popular.
I loved #9, #10 and #16
RonnieSan
September 9th, 2008 3:39 pmDang. I totally forgot about the contest and I had a design very similar to #7 (which happens to be in the lead), just with stitches across it. Oh well, great job everyone on the designs. There were so many good ones! I think my second fave are the Pacman and simple dots with the hr tag.
Mmm
September 9th, 2008 3:41 pmThis is purely for a need of a constructive criticism but can I get some suggestions on what I could’ve done to get chosen? My reasoning behind the design was that hr is a separator but of related contents since they’re in the same page. So I thought hr should separate and relate at the same time. Great selections by the way. I love the tentacle one.
gene
September 9th, 2008 3:46 pmPeople in the States, especially in the cities, might have seen this… but perhaps not in Europe? Anyways, grats to the Top 25. :)
Mona
September 9th, 2008 3:53 pmWow. I think the idea behind this contest is really cool. This blog has been a smashing success, and its number of subscribers is a direct reflection of the significant number of people it is able to reach as a result. That alone allows for a ton of diversity, which means less limits! I think that’s great. This contest in particular is neat because it offers designers a chance to participate in something creative, provides an incentive for doing so and in the end it adds an amazing resource of new graphics for all the web to discover and utilize. Thumbs up.
J.
September 9th, 2008 3:57 pmI’m a little sad that files were “too big”, I know I checked for size requirements, and tried to keep things relatively minimal.
A lot of these are just great! I almost wish it were manageable to have a series of votes on all the submissions!
Aaron
September 9th, 2008 4:07 pmYeah, these are all pretty retarded. I don’t see placing a background imagine in an HR tag as being all that creative.
dfelber
September 9th, 2008 4:28 pmwow this is cool =) 3 of my dividers were actually be chosen =) vote for #15 pls :P
do it for a poor student ;)
some descriptions you can find here:
Gomi
September 9th, 2008 4:40 pmGo, Pacman, go!
3n1gm4
September 9th, 2008 4:46 pmI’m actually kinda disappointed with the selected finalist… there are alot of quality hr’s that were not selected
Dai
September 9th, 2008 4:48 pmI think a few of the Top 25 were okay… but the rest were VERY amateurish. Quite disappointed considering this IS the site for design inspiration.
Marta Feio
September 9th, 2008 4:48 pmI don’t agree with the chosen ones. I will not vote on them.
Chris Brown
September 9th, 2008 5:15 pmYeah, I have to agree with others…there were many other submissions that should have made it in the top 25 and some others in the top 25 that should have been omitted. Its subjective but there is a distinguishable difference in some of the designs that were left behind. (I didn’t submit a design)
I also noticed the heavy selection of #7 which I thought was “ok” comparatively. But 25% of all votes?? Either I’m losing my creative abilities and missing something about the design, or there has been some good word of mouth by the designer, or someone figured out how to remove cookies (like with a browser extension) and re-voted repeatedly.
Jhack
September 9th, 2008 5:41 pmI think the best thing that all the people which agree that many of the selected finalist are extremely worst that a great part of the other submissions is to vote “I don’t know” as I did. I’d like to see what would happen if that option would win :).
Simon
September 9th, 2008 5:51 pmI can’t believe #7 got picked but none of my “torn” HR’s got picked or even shown. Boo :(
Marta Feio
September 9th, 2008 5:56 pmFrom the file ‘zip-archive with all source-files’ I saved 9 and trashed 100.
Marta Feio
September 9th, 2008 5:57 pmMost of them are terrible.
Marta Feio
September 9th, 2008 6:19 pm#7 it’s very easy to vote repeatedly on his own design.
Where is the creativity in the #8?
Joana
November 13th, 2009 8:32 amI just voted for #7 simply because it popped out, a cool concept well achieved
Paul Gendek
September 9th, 2008 6:21 pmLines!
Marta Feio
September 9th, 2008 6:26 pmI’m very disappointed with SM.
bob
September 9th, 2008 6:32 pmI love most of them, cool!
nzdesignagirl
September 9th, 2008 6:32 pmi like 3 and 9 but i thought a lot of the other ones below the finalists were better than some of the finalists, Rubens Cantuni has a really nice style, so does Ehren Harber – i liked Mihai Petici’s torn through to the code idea as well (maybe with less drop shadow though)
bob
September 9th, 2008 6:33 pmi hope i can use them in my web design.
pixelinjection.com
September 9th, 2008 6:37 pmWhat a great contest! You guys rule, looking forward to the next contest! Good luck guys!
Evan Meagher
September 9th, 2008 6:39 pmThose were all really fun to look through. Great job to everyone who submitted stuff. I’m impressed.
Diego
September 9th, 2008 6:53 pmincreible, enrealidad nunca habia considerado el poder del
muy buena coleccion.
Max
September 9th, 2008 7:03 pmThough I do think all the finalists’ approaches are pretty creative,
I think there are better ones in the selection beneath!
robin
September 9th, 2008 7:44 pmThis competition was a very creative one. I do hope that next time you’ll have a link that can show all entries so that all those artists who’d joined can view their entries just to confirm that you’ve received them- just like that of topcoder, logosauce etc.-just a suggestion.
I remember you(Smashing Magazine) mentioned”Be creative, use unusual techniques, explore your skills, do whatever it takes — we’d like you to get really excited about it.” I just like to know where is the creativity in #8 :) and some of the entries which were mere lines! hahaha
Goodluck!
mike
September 9th, 2008 8:40 pmI like how all the <hr>’s are are displayed as images and not as an <hr> element.
Nonetheless great job!
jaz
September 9th, 2008 9:06 pmvery nice, but i must say some entries on the top 25 are so-so. there are other designs that didn’t make it to the 25 spots that’s way better. i joined the contest, i admit mine were not picked, but it’s ok.
oh, i just wanna say that voting on your poll can be cheated i guess, i tried to clear my cookies, history, refreshed then voila i can vote again. geez.. why is that? #7 may have been refreshing and voting nonstop for his entry (lol), no offense meant his design is ok but there are other designs on the list that’s far better than #7.
cheers to the finalist.
Ichiro
September 9th, 2008 9:09 pmrelax people! Even though I dislike some of the entries that went onto the final stage, I respect the decision and fully understand the fact that it was a “subjective” decision; it is nearly impossible to make it objective, and that’s fine! it isnt meant to be so. I think it’s best to abstain oneself from saying “they were pretty retarded choices” or “they all look crappy” or whatnot. #7 ftw!
Ben May
September 9th, 2008 9:14 pmSome ok ones, it’s a bit hard to really make the hr look THAT good…
Liina
September 9th, 2008 10:16 pmoh, i love the last one by Mihai Petica, too bad it didn’t make it into the final 25..
sicfess
September 9th, 2008 10:17 pmsome finalists did’t deserve it
Brandon S Adkins
September 9th, 2008 10:21 pmToo many of these make me feel like I’m visiting some 1997 geocities webpage. >_>
steve
September 9th, 2008 10:28 pmGreat contest. I think the purpose was to get everybody excited and get the creative juices of the web community flowing. And look! Now there’s tons of ideas for hr tags to draw inspiration from! Hooray!
Frank
September 9th, 2008 10:33 pmToo bad mine didn’t get listed. :(
enoo
September 9th, 2008 10:48 pmI like them all! Althought I wouldn’t have chosen those 25 ones as the top ones (but yeah, tastes…).
And it’s hard to chose something without context. For example the sewing needles by Regina Silva and Ehren Harber are great and would be perfect on a sewing site, but maybe not on another kind of site. (unless there’s a ‘fabric’ style on all the page maybe).
The #5, #6 and #7 are some really nice entries. Hard to chose, I went for #7 because it’s funny to imagine a monster lurking under the webpage :)
But I think my favorite is the autumn branches by Adrian Pauly.
Gyvulius
September 9th, 2008 10:48 pmI like 4th because of simple and good looking, 7th is realy original and creative, it catches the eye, thats why it has lots of votes
Piyush
September 9th, 2008 10:55 pmi like 11th design very much because it’s shows life with happy note…. something that sets good mood.
Aakash Goel
September 9th, 2008 11:05 pmsome better ones should have been listed…
like mine…
e7art
September 9th, 2008 11:14 pmgreat idea! thank
Nisreen
September 9th, 2008 11:15 pm:(
Henning
September 9th, 2008 11:30 pmWelcome back to the frontpage era. When are the paper backgrounds comming?
Hey let’s do a <table>-design contest!
Gert-Jan
September 9th, 2008 11:38 pmNice submissions, i’ll stick with #3, the toaster
Great job everyone!
diecimarzo
September 9th, 2008 11:53 pmmy hr is not here….
obozdag
September 9th, 2008 11:58 pmThese works are really very awesome. But you don’t have to choose the best ones. You should leave this job to us as visitors. So no one would feel angry.
speedcu
September 10th, 2008 12:20 amwow, creative stuff!! i am very impressed!
Tom
September 10th, 2008 12:27 amDefinitely one of the best resources collection on Smashing Magazine! Congratulations to all the contributors: well done!
Ivan
September 10th, 2008 12:28 amOMG, this was so refreshing :) Make more contests like this please :)
maxx
September 10th, 2008 12:44 amwow this is realy nice collection … good job!
well I miss hr from Ratko Horvat in list of 25 best of … i realy like it :)
thanx for post and keep on going …. :)
Jo
September 10th, 2008 12:45 amHuu, that was a little disappointing – I was actually expecting some more unsual weird freaky fresh stuff – instead it looks a little bit like a 90′s-web-clipart-cd … but I like #7, looks like real fun in the right context!
pyros
September 10th, 2008 12:46 amtentacles! :D
#7 !
Lee
September 10th, 2008 12:48 amMy fave was the crack in the wall with the scary eyes, but that didn’t make the shortlist!! :-(
I voted for #4.
Ressi (RSA)
September 10th, 2008 12:49 amI love most of them but, Just look @ the #11….Great Work Bro…
Tommy Holiday
September 10th, 2008 12:54 amantoher amazing list! thanks for sharing!
Natrium
September 10th, 2008 12:58 amwhat a huge collection of contributions!
Remarkable: quite a lot of designs with green, nature, grass, leave-things
Mike
September 10th, 2008 1:17 am“Too many of these make me feel like I’m visiting some 1997 geocities webpage. >_>”
Spot on…….
: (
Robert
September 10th, 2008 1:26 amwhat a fantastic collection!! thanks to all you guys for some great creations!!!
Roger
September 10th, 2008 1:27 amthis is a quite inspiring post. really impressive what one can make out of a simple hr. thanks a lot!
Alison
September 10th, 2008 1:28 am“Too many of these make me feel like I’m visiting some 1997 geocities webpage. >_>”
Agreed :/
Most of the ones I liked aren’t in the top 25.. And I can’t see why some of the ones which are in the top 25 made it, they look like something I used when i was 8 for my first site O_O
MattS
September 10th, 2008 1:41 amAlthough they are all great and original looking designs, I think some of these are simply too big for what they’re meant to be used for. My vote goes to #8
Modisana
September 10th, 2008 1:56 amYou see? This is what I hate about competitions…I always feel that people who desrve to win never do. Dont get me wrong, Im not saying anyone’s work is ugly in fact most of them are just too beautiful and inspiring but I think there are some designs that should have not been on the top 25 and some that are there dont really deserve to be there. Number seven is really cool, but I think theres much nicer hr designs that ought to be winning the prize and I think a lot of people and designers would agree. (OR NOT)
Kevin
September 10th, 2008 2:05 amAbsolutely amazing results, one of the best postings ever on SM.
Thanks to all designers for so many great inspirations!
Hochi
September 10th, 2008 2:31 amvery nice submissions :)
regards
hochi
Rob
September 10th, 2008 2:53 amGreat job guys :D
No 25 FTW! :D
yaara
September 10th, 2008 3:03 amvery impressive! what can you do with a tiny line..
Rahul M
September 10th, 2008 3:37 amNice job Abhijit!!
Benjamin
September 10th, 2008 4:11 amHR is a very delicate subject !
Justin Floyd
September 10th, 2008 4:20 amI am smashed. My design did not get picked. Boo hoo!
Never mind, This is an amazing and creative group of graphics. It should remind us all that as designers we can take the most mundane and overlooked thing and turn it in to something beautiful. Great job!
LaPeGa
September 10th, 2008 4:44 amWhere’s mine?
My idea is very similar to three of the finalists, and they don’t show it!. Maybe because I made it with open source software and gave him a SVG file (which is an open and standard format) and not a PSD file which is not standard and not open to everyone who don’t have the money to pay for the Adobe Suite…
Bad SM, bad…
J
September 10th, 2008 5:12 am#7 is excellent, but I think it wont work when used
Manasa
September 10th, 2008 5:13 amAll the entries are amazing! But I do think that some of the entries that have made it to the top 25 are not as good as some that have not. Kudos to everyone who has worked so hard on beautifying one simple line.
Stuart | Design Meme
September 10th, 2008 5:15 amI’ve been thinking about a tentacle inspired redesign, so I voted for #7. :)
Johannes Findorf
September 10th, 2008 5:16 amNice, but how about browser safe CSS for displaying the with a transparent PNG ? Any suggestions?
#content hr { background-image:url(../elements/box_olive_hr.png); }
Here, IE6 is lacking…
Digiburd
September 10th, 2008 5:19 am#5 … classic…
SD
September 10th, 2008 5:53 amI like the mihai patica one the best, u see what’s underneath the page. :)
But the Ninja one isnt correct, Ninja’s dont leave trails.
Dottormoro
September 10th, 2008 6:07 am12 ;)
heather van de mark
September 10th, 2008 6:20 amThanks for showing mine, even though it’s not a finalist. It was a very pleasant surprise.
I have to agree with @Jo that a lot of these look exactly like clip art/imgs that existed when I was web designing in the mid-90s (things like zippers/stitches, birds on a line, pac man etc. i loved jim hargreaves, ive never seen anything like that before and it is beautiful and would be a strong addition to a design, not just a novelty.
Reg
September 10th, 2008 6:34 amA lot of these designs aren’t bad! I liked the following and find them very usable:
Ray Pham’s sneakers, Ricardo Mestre’s tentacles, Nour Malaeb’s equalizer, Eva Hellman’s birds on a wire, Ehren Harber’s needle and tape, Tammy Heart’s flower/lily, Vane Konsturanov’s pencil, Adrian Pauly’s autumn branch.