Smashing Magazine — Sven Lennartz

Author: Sven Lennartz

Co-Founder of Smashing Magazine. Former writer, web designer, freelancer and webworker. Author of several books.

Google Profile: https://plus.google.com/111456164589690923931/posts

Our recent article on the wallpapers for desktop and web-design has been making rounds for a while, so we decided to make another present for our readers. Christmas themes might not be everyone’s favourite themes, but in december they can be found everywhere. So, who knows, maybe you’d like to ...

Selected Wallpapers: For Desktop & Web-Design

December 7th, 2006
130 Comments

Creative wallpapers can serve as a nice source of inspiration. Particularly if you are having another creativity block, but don’t really have enough time to take a walk or browse through Flickr pools. However, it isn’t easy to find some really nice wallpapers – the choise is too big, and ...

More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free

December 3rd, 2006
19 Comments

We continue to collect best freeware and stock symbols, buttons and icons. Here are few sets we’ve stumbled upon over the last few weeks. IconCool collects Icons for Windows XP. There are 16 icon sets, which can be downloaded for free. Most of them include original icons from Microsoft.

Online Generators

November 9th, 2006
174 Comments

One can discuss whether web-generators are useful or not. On the one hand, they don’t challenge our creativity, but on the other hand they make our life easier and save our precious time. However, it doesn’t matter really. What matters is that we use them if we have to solve ...

Design Patterns: Download Buttons

November 3rd, 2006
14 Comments

In the era of Web 2.0 download-buttons are becoming more and more important. Grey and simple few years ago, now they’ve become bigger, more colourful and come in dozens of variations. As the name says, download buttons are supposed to motivate visitors to use, or at least try the product ...

Cheat Sheet Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby…

October 30th, 2006
40 Comments

Whether you’ve forgotten the name of a function or the property of a cascading style sheet – handy cheat sheets deliver the information you are looking for – immediately. Most cheat sheets are available as .pdf or .png-files, so you can print them and use them every day for whatever ...

Stock Icons: An Overview

October 20th, 2006
17 Comments

Whether you develop a software application, write an Ajaxified web-app or design a Web 2.0-stylish site, you can’t get away from tiny, small, nice and extremely helpful icons, which make the text more readable and present the information more vividly. Some icon sets can be downloaded for free. But the ...

Complete List of Best SEO-Tools

September 22nd, 2006
29 Comments

What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? We deliver answers. Here is the list of the most useful SEO-tools you ...

Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free

September 3rd, 2006
27 Comments

We’ve all been there: sitting in front of a new design layout, we realize that something doesn’t fit, is even disturbing, but we have no idea what it is and how we should improve the page. Sometimes, line-height can do the job and sometimes background can completely change the ...

Design Patterns: Badges, Tag Clouds, Huge Fonts

September 3rd, 2006
36 Comments

Web 2.0 dominates. Everywhere and all the time. The new design trends are there, in front of you and me, on the blog you’ve come from and on the blog you are going to visit next. Every now and again we find new design elements which somehow manage to become ...