Fresh inspiration, portfolios, galleries and new showcases of remarkable web design and artwork in general is what every creative head needs to refuel. Break your creativity block by exploring galleries of art, design and photography or showcases of web designs (blogs, portfolios and online-shops) and design elements (search box, back-to-top-link).
Popular tags in this category: Photos, Showcases, Portfolios, E-commerce, Blogs, Navigation, Logos, Favicons.
Editor's Note: This post is the seventh in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the Web industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that have been published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.
Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!
Read more...Editor's Note: This post is the first in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that were published recently and present them in a nice compact overview. Smashing Daily #2 and Smashing Daily #3 are now published, too.
Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!
Read more...The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The newfound freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges.
Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it's worth having a look at how the technology comes into play. While we cannot change which browser and OS our website visitors use, understanding why fonts look the way they do helps us make websites that are successful and comfortable to read in every scenario
Read more...We tend to carefully create our HTML and CSS, and meticulously place every pixel to our designs. We plan exactly where our content should be placed on a particular site.
Among many other decisions we need to make, we always keep in mind to craft a great experience for all our users. But how do we know what our users really want?
Read more...Clever graphic designers love to use typography to explore the interaction between the look of type and what type actually says. In communicating a message, a balance has to be achieved between the visual and the verbal aspects of a design.
Sometimes, however, designers explore the visual aspect of type to a much greater extent than the verbal. In these cases, the visual language does all the talking. This article explores when the visual elements of typography speak louder than words.
Read more...It has been said that "we read best what we read most". This quote was used as a type specimen in Emigre magazine in the late 1980's by Zuzana Licko. It was written in defense of her typefaces, whose elemental shapes—designed with the strictures of the early HP laser printer in mind—challenged the commonly held notions of what made typefaces legible.
The paradigm shift—wrought by the personal computer, Postscript and desktop publishing—should have had a massive impact on the shapes of our typographic characters, just as the advances of the World Wide Web further changed the way we viewed words (even though letterforms change at the pace of the most conservative reader). Thus, radical innovations like Kurt Schwitters' Systemschrift, (a phoenetic alphabet from 1927), are doomed to fail.
Read more...In 2011 we saw the rise in popularity of two relatively new trends: responsive Web design and the use of HTML’s canvas. While some websites had experimented with both, in the last 12 months we’ve seen these trends move from the fringes firmly into the mainstream.
Responsive Web design is more a concept than a technology — an ideal that many new websites aspire to. Canvas, on the other hand, is an HTML5-based technology that opens the door to a new wave of interactivity.
Read more...As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese is a difficult language, isn’t it?”. Those asking are often surprised when my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”.
While it is true (at least to many Westerners) that Japanese is an exotic language, when compared to learning other European languages, it may seem harder because it has has no relation to their own language. But from my own experiences of learning English and German (and also from seeing some European friends learning Japanese), I can say with confidence that learning spoken Japanese is, in fact, not so difficult.
Read more...
A brand new series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight and curate the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that have been published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.
Find out the answer to the question of why reinventing the wheel is a good thing, why you should make a mobile friendly website first, how to make that website, how to serve a print style sheet and you’ll get an excellent lesson in out-of-the-box thinking and innovation.
Some very important browser stats, layout patterns for responsive designers, a new device class to keep an eye on, a great article on CSS performance, and the important fact that the Unix time stamp is more nerdy than ever these days.
An experiment with fonts, lasers, node and sockets, a presentation about boring CSS, type news, JavaScript opinions, a crazy animation, and more.
Get Your Smashing Book #3!
This book is the best printed book we've produced so far: it is a valuable, cutting-edge, high-quality book that any Web designer should have on their bookshelf. Get your book now: printed or eBook!
Subscribe to our email newsletter for useful tips and valuable resources, sent out every second Tuesday.
Let's meet!
Smashing Magazine's editor-in-chief Vitaly Friedman will be speaking at the Feed The Brain conference in Venice, Italy. Let's grab a beer!
Gravity Mobile is a pioneering mobile development shop, located in the SOMA district of San Francisco. We design and build innovative mobile applications with beautiful…
Motricity is a leading provider of relevance-driven mobile merchandising, marketing, and advertising solutions, enabling advertising agencies, consumer brands and…
Free eBook: "Best of Smashing Magazine"
We've got a gift for you! To celebrate our birthday, we've released a free eBook with best articles published here on Smashing Magazine over all these years. In PDF, ePUB and Mobi. Get it now for free!
CAPTCHAs, or Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, exist to ensure that user input has not been generated by a computer. These peculiar puzzles are commonly used on the Web to protect registration and comment forms from spam. Read more...
In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Read more...
You know that we have a traditional habit of regularly researching the latest resources, tools and services out there on the Web, as productivity is a crucial asset of professional Web designers and developers. We could, and should, all integrate workflow optimization into our working practices. Read more...
With a commitment to quality content for the design community.
Smashing Media GmbH. Made in Germany. 2006-2012.