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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.

Drawing Inspiration From Creative Logos

Drawing Inspiration From Creative Logos

As designers, we are always in constant need of inpiration. Whether it be Web or graphic design, other work to fuel our creativity is essential. Logo design requires the most amount of inspiration, however. Below we present a showcase of 50 ...

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Backgrounds In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

Backgrounds In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

Web design has come a long way since its beginning, especially in terms of styling. Take a look at a website from 10 years ago and compare it to one from today. The differences are enormous. One of the major changes you will notice is the background. Today, backgrounds are ...

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Weird, Confusing and Irritating Photography

Weird, Confusing and Irritating Photography

We daily come across with so many photos some of them are good while some are not happening. Some photos are so ordinary that you hardly keep them in mind while some of the photos are simply outstanding and awesome pieces of photography that you reminisce them again and again, ...

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Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices

Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices

As a general rule, most Web developers, especially usability enthusiasts, say it is bad practice to use drop-down menus because they are confusing, annoying and oftentimes dysfunctional. From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout. If structured correctly, drop-down ...

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Beautiful Pictures For Spring Inspiration

Beautiful Pictures For Spring Inspiration

Inspiration is all around us: you can derive new ideas from people you meet, places you visit and observations you make. Sometimes it is enough just to take a look around and observe the beauty of nature surrounding us everywhere. For instance, spring is often considered the most beautiful and ...

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Bizarre Surreal and Dark Art Pictures

Bizarre Surreal and Dark Art Pictures

Art is a thing that attracts almost every individual. Today we would like to share with you two different but very interesting mediums of art which are called as Surreal and Dark Art. These types of art are quite different from other conventional mediums ...

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Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

By Jacob GubeOn websites that have a lot of pages, breadcrumb navigation can greatly enhance the way users find their way around. In terms of usability, breadcrumbs reduce the number of actions a website visitor needs to take in order to get to a higher-level page, and ...

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35 (Really) Stunning Photos and Pictures

35 (Really) Stunning Photos and Pictures

We love beautiful photography. In photos, the beauty isn't necessarily reflected in an eye-catching combination of colors; perspectives, angle, composition and, most importantly, the idea behind the shot or the situation in which the shot was taken, are particularly important when it comes for our showcases.Over the last months we ...

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Fantastic Typography Blogs For Your Inspiration

Fantastic Typography Blogs For Your Inspiration

By Joel ReyesSome say that web design without typography is like an orange without its peel, it just isn’t complete. Typography encompasses the reality of effective web design and achieves success in creating web page identity, eye-catching sites, and the enhancement of visual appearance.Typography is much more than the “art ...

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Showcase of Beautiful Fashion Websites

Showcase of Beautiful Fashion Websites

From a web designer's perspective, it can be very interesting to look at the top websites from a particular industry to see how they relate to their target audience, the different approaches that are used, and how they compare to websites in other industries. The fashion industry consists of companies ...

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Slideshows In Web Design: When And How To Use Them

Slideshows In Web Design: When And How To Use Them

The key to smart strategic Web design is finding an appropriate and interactive way to display information. One comes upon endless possibilities when searching for ways to display information. One solution, slideshows and sliders, is an excellent way to display information such as images in an organized and compact manner. ...

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20 Beautiful Video Motion Pieces

20 Beautiful Video Motion Pieces

A show reel is the motion picture equivalent of an artist's portfolio. It is typically used as a tool to promote an artist's skill, talent and experience in a selected field, such as acting, directing, cinematography, editing, special effects, animation, video games or another graphic-related field. It is conventional in ...

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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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  • Re: High Education!

    I did web design & development at university of abertay in Scotland. You can find other UK courses from the UCAS site - http://search.ucas.com/cgi-bin/hsrun/se…

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    Hey everybody (apologies in advance if I missed the correct forum section)!My name is Mykolas. I am 18-year-old student…

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    OK, yeah, I understand what you are saying. However, when I tried converting some of my images to PNG8, even though the alpha transparency works great, gradients aren't…

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    Thank you smart.1, I will do so. I would have liked to have a general discussion on this topic. How do you style your content? By using a WYSIWYG-Editor,…

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    I am good at PS but never really used IL so I will do that in PS with my Wacom tablet ( I wanted to do it in vectors so I could print it but for start raster will do…

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