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Category: Inspiration

This category is supposed to help you break your creativity block by exploring galleries of art, design and photography. It also features 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.

35 Beautiful Photography Websites

35 Beautiful Photography Websites

Interest in photography has exploded over the last 10 years, largely thanks to the developments in digital photography. Cameras and computers have become cheaper and more powerful, software more sophistocated and printers can now print photos that are as good (if not better) than anything produced in a chemical darkroom. ...

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Beautiful Examples of Vexel Artworks and Tutorials

Beautiful Examples of Vexel Artworks and Tutorials

Vexel art is a digital art that is an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the vector graphics technique, but is distinguished from normal vector graphics or raster images. "Vexel" itself is a mixture of two words ‘Vector’ and ‘Pixel’. Vexel designs are composed by using multiple layered ...

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Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

The "about me"-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites. In a world that's becoming increasingly connected through the Web, it's important that you engage your audience in a personal and friendly way, otherwise you risk just being ...

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35 Examples Of Stunning Macro Photography

35 Examples Of Stunning Macro Photography

Macro photography is also known as close-up photography. Compared to other types of photography, macro photography is quite difficult, because of the nifty equipment, lightning and other techniques involved. However, in the end it comes down to what kind of pictures you want to take and what level of precision ...

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Welcoming And Informative Introductions In Web Design

Welcoming And Informative Introductions In Web Design

Corporate Web design has certain elements designed to attract customers. One of those elements is the introduction. The page or website introduction does what you would think: it introduces the website or page to the user and entices them to visit more of the website.Using an introduction has several benefits. ...

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Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions

Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions

A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content's corresponding tab control. Module tabs ...

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Informative And Usable Footers In Web Design

Informative And Usable Footers In Web Design

Website designs have so many different elements that work together to convey information in a usable and organized manner. For a website to be effective, every element on the page, from the header to the footer, needs to add to its overall usability and readability.In this article, we'll take a ...

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60 Rare and Unusual Vintage Signs

60 Rare and Unusual Vintage Signs

In the U.S., most outdoor signs made between 1890 and and 1950 were constructed of a base of heavy rolled iron, which was die cut into the desired shape, then coated with layers of colored powdered glass and fired in a kiln. This process made them durable and weather-resistant. Signs ...

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Effective Maintenance Pages: Examples and Best Practices

Effective Maintenance Pages: Examples and Best Practices

Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it's just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it's an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a ...

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Retro Futurism At Its Best: Designs and Tutorials

Retro Futurism At Its Best: Designs and Tutorials

Concepts of the future for the way we live our lives have been expressed in forms of art, design, movies, comics, and even cartoons. For many decades before man even landed on the Moon, people have been fascinated with space and the endless possibilities it could bring. The future ...

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50 Beautiful Flash Websites

50 Beautiful Flash Websites

Flash enabled designers and developers to deliver rich content over the browsers, creating motion, interactivity and an impressive visual experience. Good Flash-sites do not require too much bandwidth, load fast and allow for a smooth interaction; besides, beautiful Flash-based sites are Photoshop masterpieces, transporting some kind of reality and fantasy ...

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Scientific Designs and Tutorials That Will Inspire You

Scientific Designs and Tutorials That Will Inspire You

Art and science. The two are more known to be near opposites in the world. Yet, when creativity collides with a logically inspired motif, the results can be spectacular. With a mixture of creative graphics, illustrations, 3D models, trendy typography, photo manipulations and more, you are able to create some ...

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(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos

(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos

Photography is a very powerful medium and a very difficult craft. Excellent photos don’t only display some facts — they tell stories, awake feelings and manage to share with the audience the emotions a photographer experienced when clicking the shot button. Taking excellent pictures is damn hard as you need ...

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35 Fantastic HDR Pictures

35 Fantastic HDR Pictures

Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. In graphics HDR imaging is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately ...

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Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages

Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages

Every day you visit one of them. The pages, which don’t exist any longer, have moved to a new server or have never existed at all. Once you’ve missed your intended destination, either through a bad or outdated link, or a typo in the page you were hoping to reach, ...

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Creativity Spark From Masters Of Illustration

Creativity Spark From Masters Of Illustration

Creative thinking is an essential part of design workflow. Whatever sketch you are working on, at some point you find yourself in the situation where you simply need some fresh ideas to find your path around the creativity block. Going away may help. Listening to the music may help. But ...

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35 Beautiful Music Album Covers

35 Beautiful Music Album Covers

Album cover art is often considered to be one of the “extincted” fields in modern graphics design. In times when digital copies are cheaper and quicker to get, album covers have somehow lost their importance as less and less customers actually buy CDs and LPs in the stores. That’s a ...

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Beautiful Black and White Photography

Beautiful Black and White Photography

If you’ve been following Smashing Magazine for a while, you know that almost all posts from the Monday Inspiration series are pretty colorful and eye-catching. This post is an exception. Compared to colorful designs where catchy colors help the design to stand out, in black-and-white designs the ability to stand ...

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Web Design Trends For 2009

Web Design Trends For 2009

We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As a result, new design approaches come up, ...

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404 Error Pages: Reloaded

404 Error Pages: Reloaded

Three weeks ago we’ve showcased some of the most beautiful, creative and user-friendly 404 Error Pages; we’ve collected some interesting ideas one can use to help out the visitors once they got lost ony your page. We’ve also asked our readers to design their own 404 pages and promised ...

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100 Obscure and Remarkable CD Covers

100 Obscure and Remarkable CD Covers

While recording artists and bands are busy recording their albums, a separate effort is usually being made behind the scenes to plan for the launch, promotion and circulation of the new tracks. The creation of CD cover art is an intergral part of this process. Some CD covers feature heavily edited ...

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If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers…

If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers…

Styles in design are described and classified in many ways. Sometimes they are given a moniker, like “Web 2.0,” other times they are referred to by their appearance: grungy, minimalist, retro, big type. The people (and brands) to which modern design styles are attributed are as numerous as the styles ...

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Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs

Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs

We all love beautiful, usable and impressive web designs. To achieve them, web developers need to focus on many aspects, but basically it all boils down to the question, how well the content is presented and how easily the information can be perceived. Harmonic color schemes are as important as ...

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10 Futuristic User Interfaces

10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, ...

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Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Successful product design manages to reveal useful functionality beyond its appealing form. No matter how excellent a design looks like, most customers aren’t likely to spend money on something they won’t be able to use. On the other hand, most people are likely to buy something useful despite the design ...

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30 Unforgettable Movie Opening Sequences

30 Unforgettable Movie Opening Sequences

We all know that first impressions are important, right? Well, the same goes for film. The opening title sequence of a film is that film’s opportunity to make a good first impression on you, the viewer. A well-crafted title sequence introduces the audience to the tone and ...

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Tribute To Graffiti: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks

Tribute To Graffiti: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks

Street culture and graffiti are well-known for being provocative, appealing, bold and uncompromising. Originally used by gangs to mark their territory in some urban area, graffitis have now become a rich medium for unrestricted expression of ideas and statements. In fact, creative designers and artists across the globe use this ...

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