To celebrate all the little moments of inspiration that comes from the colors of your favorite music album, or the typography on a book cover, we have compiled some resources for you which honor the beauty of graphic design and the ideas behind it. Perfect to squeeze into a short coffee break. Enjoy! The variety is endless, and sometimes you’re lucky and find a little piece of art shining through the sheer mass. It’s inspiring to see how designers boil the idea behind a book down to the limited canvas space of one rectangle. What will it inspire you to? Perhaps something extraordinary, like your own series of book covers made with HTML and CSS?
Read more…
It’s time to freshen up your desktop! This post features desktop wallpapers for March 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop! Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.
Read more…
Everybody loves a nice set of icons, right? Today we collected some icon sets that you can use in your projects for free. The following collection offers both — payment provider icons just like summer goodness to help you over a rainy day. All icons can be downloaded and used for free. Enjoy!
Read more…
To help you boost productivity, save time, and, obviously, nerves, in this article, Cosima Mielke has picked some valuable Photoshop resources, plugins, and scripts for you. Some of them will speed up routine tasks so you can concentrate more on your actual work, others build a bridge between Photoshop and code so your design mockups can benefit from the best of both worlds.
Read more…
Today we’re happy to release a lovely free icon set with 72 related icons. The set includes icons in 4 sizes and in 8 formats: AI, CSH, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, Sketch and Webfont. The icon set is free to use in personal and commercial projects. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to the team over at Round Icons for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the great work!
Read more…
In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will be able to distinguish how Illustrator works with Live Trace and with the Pen Tool. Two different results from the same image, the first close to hand-drawing, the second more of a cartoon style. First you’ll need to know how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don’t worry! You can download her drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator.
Read more…
Today’s post features a collection of unique desktop wallpapers for February 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions, with and without a calendar, and can be downloaded for free. Created by designers and artists from across the globe, they are just waiting to give your desktop a makeover and provide you with some fresh inspiration. Now you only need to decide which one will accompany you through the month — and that won’t be easy given all the creative ideas the community has come up with. A big thank-you to everyone who participated!
Read more…
The new year is an occasion to start things fresh, to rethink current practices and habits. So why not start small? Clean up your desktop and give it an inspiring new background. We might have something for you: desktop wallpapers created by artists and designers from across the globe as a part of our monthly desktop wallpapers challenge.
Read more…
In 2010, back in the time when we started searching for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine, we launched the monthly wallpaper series. Since then, we’ve had remarkable desktop wallpapers designed by various artists from all around the globe. It would be our pleasure, dear readers, for you to share your artworks with all of us and we heartily welcome you to join in the monthly wallpaper submissions here on Smashing Magazine! Feel free to design bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but creative, unusual and absolutely stunning wallpapers.
Read more…
Today we are glad to release a beautiful set of icons designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko from Minsk, Belarus, and released for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all of them for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything! As long as you don’t resell bundles of the illustrations, you can use the illustrations for anything you need. A sincere thank you to NastiFunny (Anastasia Kolisnichenko) for releasing the illustrations.
Read more…
