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.
Web design is essentially the organization of information into a readable, usable, functional and accessible format. Good organization of content is crucial, and you need a strong layout that you can build a website upon. You can use numerous interface elements and structures to organize content, such as jQuery-based content ...
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Floral typography is the technique that combines typography, calligraphy and lettering to create dynamic, "flourishing" designs. With the help of floral elements you can create very tempting and vivid artworks in which the typography seems to be shaped by plants and flowers. In this way you can convey your message ...
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Going to web conferences is a great opportunity to make new contacts and exchange business cards. Unfortunately, we have an industry filled with creative people who have no creative marketing for themselves. Sure, many have business cards, but one in a hundred have something really cool. These unique treasures, ...
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Silhouette photography is a wonderful way to convey drama, mystery, emotion and mood in a picture. A silhouette is defined as a view of an object or a scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. Pictures like these often don’t convey ...
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Non profit websites share many of the same best practices as any website. They need to be user friendly, easily navigable, and use appropriate fonts, colors, and other design elements. But often a non profit website needs to offer more than your typical corporate site. A non profit's website needs to ...
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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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Instead of getting into the heads of successful designers, we should be getting into the head of the audience we're designing for. There are many ways this can be done, one of which is music. Relying on senses other than your vision can evoke a greater comprehension for what feeling ...
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Using a light source the right way can add dimension and beauty to a website design. Strong light sources create a stark contrast between light areas and shadows in a design, making the elements look more realistic and dimensional and less flat. Some websites opt instead for a dim light ...
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Graffiti represents an art form that is unrestricted, one that rebels against conventional forms of artwork. Graffiti is intertwined into human history, dating back to the Roman Empires where they were plastered onto walls to make political statements and satirize current events.Modern graffiti achieves many of the ...
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From the Napa Wineries in California to the vineyards of Australia and France, the beautiful designs of these wine maker's websites embody the spirit of the vine. Trends for winery websites have been leaning towards a dynamic Flash introduction, animation and beautiful graphics, which would give the best representation of ...
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When visiting a blog for the first time, you get an instant and strong impression from the design and layout. Cluttered and confusing blog layouts can be an instant turn-off, while sleek and elegant designs immediately captivate the audience.The 35 blog designs featured in this showcase engage visitors with a ...
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Everyday we see objects consisting of one, two, and three dimensions. By incorporating mathematics with design, the outcome of computer generated fractals is based upon complexity, creativity and perception.By removing the beautiful array of colors we typically see in fractals at these finer magnifications, the manipulation of fractional dimensions with ...
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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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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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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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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 ...
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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 ...
Read more... | 201 CommentsWhile 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 ...
Read more... | 200 Comments
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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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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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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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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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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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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