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.
Using the right color is very important to any design. It can literally make or break your design. While there are a lot of good colors and color combinations to use when designing, we often tend to stick with our favorite color(s).
I wanted to find out from the top web designers what their favorite colors were so I contacted these 10 awesome designers and asked them the following question.
Read more...When I was a child, McDonald's was my favorite restaurant. I could remember always asking my mom if we could go, and everytime we did go, I always had so much fun on the playplace. I always ordered the Happy Meal. One thing that I always remembered about going to McDonald's was that big, life-sized Ronald McDonald mascot.
Read more...The most recent collection of creative blog designs was featured here on Smashing Magazine back in July. Only three months have passed and we’ve got a new dose of inspiration for you. Beautiful and sophisticated designs are constantly appearing on the Web; creative activity is in non-stop mode, despite global economic shocks and unfortunate events; and this is surely a positive sign.
Today, we showcase 60 fresh, beautiful, inventive and, hopefully, inspiring blog designs. The variety of styles represented in this collection is considerable, so everyone will be able to find a tasty piece of inspiration for their own creative aspirations. Notice that every screenshot is clickable and leads to the website itself.
Read more...The other day, while browsing some logo galleries, I noticed the trend of using stars in logos. I saw all kinds of different companies and organizations who used a star in their logo. It used to be that the main companies who used a star were only entertainment companies or Hollywood companies, but now, I even saw pharmaceutical companies and medical companies using the star.
I think that this has quickly become a fast growing trend in the design community. Here is a compilation of 50 star logos that I gathered to show you this up and coming trend in logo design.
Read more...Textures have become more popular and been put to greater use in recent years. They're not limited to Web design either; textures of all kinds are used in print design, illustration, traditional art, TV commercials... you name it! Texture is one of the best ways to add depth to your design, whether it's subtle noise on a clean vector illustration or a lot of grunginess throughout a layout.
Over the last weeks we collected numerous examples of beautiful textured Web designs to inspire you, followed by a small collection of links to help you get started in using textures in your own designs.
Read more...Inspiration is vital for any designer. This is why so many CSS galleries, design galleries and artistic showcases are floating around on the Web. Designers use these at certain times for a quick fix of inspiration, especially when the pressure of deadlines prevent them from seeking out offline, or "alternative," forms of inspiration, as important as they are.
No designer should ever feel that taking time to find true inspiration is time wasted. This article explores offline sources of inspiration and discusses how they can be treated as a part of the design process. Furthermore, we'll look into a few methods of deriving this inspiration, so it becomes an active part of creativity and be done more effectively.
Also consider our previous articles:
This post is the second article of our new series "Global Web Design". Over the next months we'll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started last week with Russian web design. We continue now with Ireland (Lee Munroe). If you'd like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we'll discuss the details.
Ireland. The land of the leprechauns, green fields and Guinness. But what about the web industry in Ireland? There have been a host of interesting things happening both North and South of Ireland recently. Nicholas Felton talked in Belfast, Ze Frank talked in Dublin, FOWA came to Dublin for the first time and FOWD came to Belfast. Are all these high profile events an indication that there are exciting things happening throughout Ireland?
To give you an insight into some of the interesting stuff happening, I've interviewed several high profile Irish designers involved in the web industry and how they feel Ireland is making an impact on the rest of the world, along with a showcase of some of the more inspiring websites being produced.
Read more...This article is the first of our new series "Global Web Design". Over the next months we'll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed for more similar posts. If you'd like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us.
The land mass that is one-sixth of the Earth is always surprising. In this article we present the hidden force that is Russia: we won't dwell on the classic stereotypes but will rather look at the creativity flowing through.
The era of professional and commercial online design started in Russia about a decade ago. We're now seeing an increase in professional design and development. I won't concentrate much on the history of Web design in Russia; that has been happening for ages. Like everywhere in the world, Web design came to Russia as a modern way to present any kind of information to an audience online. So, principles such as simplicity, accessibility and eye-catching design have been cultivated for several years.
Web development as a profession was relegated to the elite for years until geek heads and artists took it over. For a few years there was a boom of home pages and tiny corporate websites that were built with any regard for the end user. This trend ended thankfully, in large part due to the highly scaled websites that came out some original and still unique studios founded back in the end of 90s.
Read more...Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now!") or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. "Learn more...") that asks the user to take action.
How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user's attention and entice them to click? We'll try to answer this question in this post by sharing some effective design techniques and exploring some examples.
Read more...
Opportunity: WellnessFX, a fast-growing health 2.0 company based in The Mission District in San Francisco, is looking for an engineer with skills in front-end…
YAGER is currently seeking a talented and experienced Game Systems Designer to join our pre-production team of yet unannounced title. Join us in shaping the direction…
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