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.
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 time, you don't want to spend too much time on a temporary page when you really should be working on the website itself.
The best thing to do is create a simple "Coming soon" page to notify visitors of what will eventually be there. Good "Coming soon" pages come in two basic varieties: the informational design, which simply tells visitors what will be there after launch; and the page that invites early visitors to sign up for updates or even to request a beta (or alpha) invitation. Below are some great examples of each, followed by some best practices for creating your own "Coming soon" page. You definitely won't see among these the generic "Under construction" page (with the cute construction graphic) that used to litter the Web.
Read more...“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 of international thinkers, and a community working towards a future that is designed to be interactive, environmentally responsible, and prosperous.
Here is a look at the visual personality of London, based on visits to the city's major art museums, attendance at the 2009 London Design Festival, and interviews with artists and designers who call the great city home.
London magazines including The Face, i-D, Blitz, and Arena became major influences on international design during the eighties and nineties. The Face was known as a showcase of London street style and experimental graphic design during Neville Brody’s tenure as Art Director from 1982-86. Brody incorporated hand-drawn typefaces and custom graphic symbols into his page layouts.
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...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...
A brand new series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight and curate the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that have been published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.
Find out the answer to the question of why reinventing the wheel is a good thing, why you should make a mobile friendly website first, how to make that website, how to serve a print style sheet and you’ll get an excellent lesson in out-of-the-box thinking and innovation.
Some very important browser stats, layout patterns for responsive designers, a new device class to keep an eye on, a great article on CSS performance, and the important fact that the Unix time stamp is more nerdy than ever these days.
An experiment with fonts, lasers, node and sockets, a presentation about boring CSS, type news, JavaScript opinions, a crazy animation, and more.
Get Your Smashing Book #3!
This book is the best printed book we've produced so far: it is a valuable, cutting-edge, high-quality book that any Web designer should have on their bookshelf. Get your book now: printed or eBook!
Subscribe to our email newsletter for useful tips and valuable resources, sent out every second Tuesday.
Let's meet!
Smashing Magazine's editor-in-chief Vitaly Friedman will be speaking at the Feed The Brain conference in Venice, Italy. Let's grab a beer!
This position will be responsible for the management of the billing and collection activities of the Company. This role includes client implementations, invoice and…
We’re looking for a passionate UI Designer to create human-friendly, clean and effective interfaces for our desktop software, the Thingiverse web community, and…
Free eBook: "Best of Smashing Magazine"
We've got a gift for you! To celebrate our birthday, we've released a free eBook with best articles published here on Smashing Magazine over all these years. In PDF, ePUB and Mobi. Get it now for free!
CAPTCHAs, or Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, exist to ensure that user input has not been generated by a computer. These peculiar puzzles are commonly used on the Web to protect registration and comment forms from spam. Read more...
In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Read more...
You know that we have a traditional habit of regularly researching the latest resources, tools and services out there on the Web, as productivity is a crucial asset of professional Web designers and developers. We could, and should, all integrate workflow optimization into our working practices. Read more...
With a commitment to quality content for the design community.
Smashing Media GmbH. Made in Germany. 2006-2012.