Smashing Magazine we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

Raise The Curtain For… Smashing Jobs

A job board? Right. Not a big thing compared to Einsteins theory of relativity. But in the universe of web-developers where most of us use to live, Smashing Jobs may turn out to be a pretty good damn thing. In fact, it has benefits for both job seekers and employers. And you can also use our promotion code to post your job openings for free. So let’s find out what’s in there for you.

If you are a creative person, no matter if you are seeking actively for a job or not, you may get some fresh opportunities for your career or your order books. Since Smashing Jobs is fully integrated into Smashing Magazine you can immediately scan recent job openings while reading our latest article.

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Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples

Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don’t have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it.

That’s why in most cases it’s where simple, intuitive and conventional solutions are usually the best option. However, it doesn’t mean that they need to be boring. One year ago we’ve presented modern approaches of navigation design. Let’s take a look at what’s different now, which trends one can observe and what ideas you can develop further in your projects.

This article presents recent trends, examples and innovative solutions for design of modern navigation menus. All images are clickable and lead to the sites from which they’ve been taken. We’ve missed something? Definitely! Let us know in the comments!

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Breathtaking Typographic Posters

You can’t design without type. However, yon can use only type (or mostly only type) to create breath-taking designs. In fact, many graphic designers and artists take exactly this route to communicate their ideas through their works. The results are sometimes crazy, sometimes artsy, sometimes beautiful, but often just different from things we’re used to. Thus designers explore new horizons and we explore new viewing perspectives which is what inspiration is all about.

This post showcases over 50 breathtaking typographic posters designed by artists across the globe. We feature Oriental, Iranian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Russian typographic posters as well as a number of further references. This isn’t a “best of”, there is no ranking and the collection isn’t supposed to be complete; it’s rather subjective and quite random. All screenshots are clickable; however, links not always lead directly to the corresponding image (e.g. it’s impossible in Flash-based sites) — sometimes you’ll need to search for it.

You may also want to take a look at the article Typography In Motion we’ve published few months ago.

So what can be achieved out of simple letters and symbols? Please be patient, some screenshots are huge.

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Gallery Of Date Stamps And Calendars

Designer’s attention to small details often has a significant impact on how visitors perceive the overall design of a web-site. Although users’ main focus usually lies on finding information, it’s nice to find the content being supported by finest visual details. This holds for favicons, shopping carts, pagination and tag clouds we’ve covered in our earlier posts. But it also holds for… well, date stamps and calendars. Apparently, the latter are used not only in weblogs, but also on large web-sites where events, news and any kind of time-planning is involved.

In such designs a tear-off calendar is often used to symbolize the date in a most intuitive way. However, it’s not always the case. In fact, designers seem to experiment with a number of different approach one wouldn’t really expect from such a tiny design element. Out collection of appealing and interesting calendar icons and date stamps is supposed to prove it. It might provide you with some fresh ideas once you need to design some original date stamp, but don’t know where to start from. All images are clickable.

Some of presented examples may not look nice at the first glance, but they all have some idea behind them — an idea you may use and develop further.

You might want to check out the following articles as well:

• Favicons: The Delicate Beauties
• Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Pagination Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Shopping Cart: Examples and Good Practices

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Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy.

One year ago we’ve published the post with 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without where we provided references to the most useful CSS-techniques which are often used in almost every project. Over the last year we’ve been observing what’s happening with the CSS-based web-development, and we collected most useful CSS-techniques we’ve stumbled upon — for us and for our readers.

In this post we present 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding. You definitely know some of them, but definitely not all of them. Some technique is missing? Let us know in the comments to this post.

Thanks to all developers who contributed to the CSS-based design over the last year. The community appreciates it.

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45 More Excellent Blog Designs

We, designers, are creative folks. And being creative, we permanently strive for inspiration — innovative approaches, crazy ideas, smashing concepts and, in general, unique designs which can help us to observe a given problem from a fresh perspective. This is why we always have some fancy design books laying around on our desk, and this is why we enjoy observing other people’s work — basically just because we can learn a hell of a lot from them.

There are things one can do a number of times without worrying about becoming boring. For instance, collecting and showcasing excellent blog designs. In this post we do it already the third time. Why? Web design lives in blogs; new developments appear there, that’s where the music plays. And that’s where you need to look for in order to keep up with current trends and developments.

This post presents 45 excellent blog designs with a perfect layout and unique personal note. We haven’t analyzed the content of the blogs; instead we focused on ideas, approaches, graphics and layouts.

If you miss some stunning blog designs in this showcase please let us know in the comments. However, it’s also possible that these designs have already been covered in one of our previous showcases:

• 30 More Excellent Blog Designs
• 45 Excellent Blog Designs

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