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.
Most bloggers and website designers understand how difficult it can be to attract visitors to a website. In fact, most websites have just moments to attract potential readers. Several factors contribute to how well a website attracts its readers. These factors include well-written headlines, interesting content and design quality. While all of these aspects are important, today we will focus on a very specific and sometimes overlooked element in a website’s design: the “Read more” or “Continue reading” link that follows a headline or summary of an article.
Every website has its own way of asking readers to click on an article link. Some websites have very prominent links, others are a bit subtler. Either way, website and user interface designers have thought up some very creative and innovative ways of inviting readers to read on. In this showcase, we will present 45 websites that have excellent “Read more” and “Continue reading” links in their design. Hopefully, these websites will serve as inspiration for your future projects or at least remind you not to ignore this important design element.
Read more...There are things that can't be showcased too often. For instance, beautiful blog designs. We have presented hundreds of beautiful blog designs in the past and now it's time to provide our readers with a fresh portion of tasty design inspiration.
All blogs listed below have an original, unique design. They aren't based upon some ready-to-be-used WordPress templates, but are the result of a hard, time-consuming work – therefore they deserve respect and admiration. Yes, many of these design are quite "heavy" on graphcs, not only because they look impressive on a tiny 550px-width-screenshot.
Below we present 50 new, beautiful, creative and (hopefully) inspiring blog designs. We feature many various styles and designs – hopefully, everybody will find some inspiring elements and design solutions for his or her next design. And, of course, thanks to all designers and artists featured in this post! All screenshots are linked to the original designer's site.
Read more...Also known as International Style, the Swiss Style does not simply describe a style of graphic design made in Switzerland. It became famous through the art of very talented Swiss graphic designers, but it emerged in Russia, Germany and Netherlands in the 1920’s. This style in art, architecture and culture became an ‘international’ style after 1950’s and it was produced by artists all around the globe. Despite that, people still refer to it as the Swiss Style or the Swiss Legacy.
This progressive, radical movement in graphic design is not concerned with the graphic design in Switzerland, but rather with the new style that had been proposed, attacked and defended in the 1920s in Switzerland. Keen attention to detail, precision, craft skills, system of education and technical training, a high standard of printing as well as a clear refined and inventive lettering and typoraphy laid out a foundation for a new movement that has been exported worldwide in 1960s to become an international style.
Read more...No one understands the statement, “design is everywhere” better than us designers. But comprehension and integration are two totally separate acts. From food packaging, to billboards, to book covers, catalogs, websites, and everything in between, we spend the majority of our waking hours on our computers designing and/or looking at these designs through the portals of our monitors. But when the computer is shut down, does your “design radar” go off-line, as well?
For instance, when it’s time to grocery shop, are you in the get-in/get-out as fast as possible mindset? Or do you treat the experience as a journey through Design Mecca – with sources of inspiration lining the shelves from wall to wall? When you’re waiting on the unbearably slow line at the post office do you temper your impatience by burying your nose in your iPhone? Or do you make note of the ugly signage covering the walls and kill the time by redesigning it better in your head? “Cranking up your design radar” is about never turning off the designer in ourselves.
In this article, we challenge even the most seasoned of designers to approach the most mundane of tasks (going to the bank, post office, grocery store, etc.) from a whole new designerly perspective.
Read more...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. Now, once you've acquired a digital setup, the economic restrictions of film and development costs have been removed and the cost of photography is virtually nil.
Along with these developments in photography has been the parallel development of the Web. Ten years ago websites were largely clumsy, HTML driven constructions. Today, contemporary photographers have powerful tools such as Flash, WordPress and DreamWeaverwith which to develop their websites. Photographers can also sell their work through companies such as PhotoShelter or ImageKind, and through photo libraries such as Alamy and iStockPhoto, opening up new revenue streams.
The result is that photographers are finding new and exciting ways to showcase their best work online. We took a look at some of the beautiful photography websites that we could find, analyzing the design trends and the reasons why these websites work.
You may want to take a look at the following related posts:
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 another faceless web designer among a sea of websites.
We had to go through hundreds of sites to come up with the following list. It seems most designers and developers run out of steam by the time they got around to developing their about pages. Most designers we came across simply threw up a few hastily written words about themselves instead of treating the page as an important asset. Others, however, have truly taken the time to treat their about page as if it were important as the home page. In fact, some went as far as using their about pages as their home page.
We present 60 beautiful and effective about pages that engage users and neatly present their designers. We also examine the growing trend of Business Card Websites (BCW's).
Read more...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. The first is that introductions can coax the user further into the website. If the introduction is colorful, well-designed and has a good title, the user will be interested in the rest of the content. The other advantage is that you can provide quick information about your business or website to new users.
Read more...A module tab is a 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 are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs, they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content.
This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. We share with you some best practices to consider when using module tabs, a listing of real-world examples of websites the take advantage of module tabs, as well as tutorials and free downloadable scripts for building and deploying module tabs in your sites.
Read more...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 look at the footer and see what exactly makes for a good website footer. Keep in mind that just because the footer is at the bottom of the page doesn't mean you should slack off with good design practice.
We'll look here at what to include in footers, the importance of site maps, usability practices and styling ideas and trends. We've also compiled almost 50 well-designed footers to give you ideas and inspiration for your own footer designs.
Read more...
We are looking for someone who is really passionate about creating great web apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This position is primarily for front-end developer…
The University of Notre Dame has been named one of The Chronicle's 'Great Colleges To Work For' in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 – visit http://ND jobs to see why!…
With a commitment to quality content for the design community.
Smashing Media Made in Germany. 2006-2013. Impressum