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.
We have showcased different media of art and the different routes that you can take to express your creativity. We covered vexel artworks, graffiti, light paintings, handcraft, Moleskine art and many more. Now, to provide you with some fresh perspective, we decided to showcase a list of some inspiring watercolor ...
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I was pretty excited when I came up with the idea of examining and showcasing some of the most famous beer and alcohol-related websites from a number of countries around the world. After all, who doesn't like the odd drink now and again? (Well, besides me — I can't stand ...
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How would you like to design a beautiful, colorful, stimulating website that is captivating, memorable, and allows you to let your creative juices flow without the need to worry too much about conventional usability and best practices? In today's web design market, it's rare that such a project would present ...
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Photoshop is a magical tool for digital artists and photographers, and it rules the digital imaging world. It is not just a tool, though; Photoshop is a blank canvas that invites you to perform magic with your creativity. It gives you room to creatively manipulate photos and explore the artist ...
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Today designing a unique, compelling portfolio has become a crucial task for designers, studios, companies and everyone whose business is on the Web. Not only does it help one stand out among the numerous competitors, but it is also a great tool for self-expression and demonstration of skills.Now designers face ...
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T-shirts, as you'll surely agree, play a big part in the design world. Sometimes, we designers don't get the kinds of projects we want, and so we are left to apply our creativity in some other way, many of us opting to submit graphics in t-shirt competitions or printing them ...
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Deciding what to do once you've purchased a domain but haven't yet launched the website is always a bit of a conundrum. Leaving up your domain registrar or Web host's generic page seems unprofessional, especially if you're trying to drum up advance press for your new project. At the same ...
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“There is no specific London style.” At least that's what the ‘Super Contemporary’ show at London’s Design Museum proclaims. During an exploration of London's art and design scene in September 2009, what did emerge was a city with a unique sense of its own personality and history, a fertile hub ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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," ...
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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...
Read more... | 245 CommentsI was pretty excited when I came up with the idea of examining and showcasing some of the most famous beer and alcohol-related websites from a number of countries around the world. After all, who doesn’t like the odd drink now and again? (Well, besides me — I can’t stand ...
Read more... | 234 Comments
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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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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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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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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As designers, we’re all trying to get better at what we do. We surf the Web daily for hours trying to find useful tips and tricks to enhance our design skills. But what if we spent less time surfing the Web looking for inspiration and more time creating and designing ...
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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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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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Most photographers do not feel comfortable in taking photographs in bad weather. Yet bad weather sometimes presents the perfect opportunity to get most out of our skills. In particular, in the beginning of autumn rain can provide the perfect opportunity to capture wonderful photos. Shooting in rain produces dramatic atmosphere ...
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