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

  • Raise The Curtain For… Smashing Jobs

    February 27th, 2008 in Events | 36 Comments

    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.

    Smashing Jobs Logo
    Smashing Jobs Logo

    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.

    Screenshot

    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.

    Screenshot

    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.

    Blog Calendar Icon Blog Calendar Icon Blog Calendar Icon Screenshot Blog Calendar Icon

    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:

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  • Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

    February 21st, 2008 in CSS | 192 Comments

    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.

    CSS-Technique

    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.

    Screenshot

    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:

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Sideblog

Ross Johnson discusses 8 forgotten fonts you may use in CSS. Among them are Palatino Linotype, Century Gothic, Copperplate and Gill Sans — apparently, these fonts are installed on a variety of operating systems.

Palatino

How creative can a table of contents be? Designobserver presents Thirty Tables of Contents. The collection includes excerpts from the books by Philip Larkin, Philip Roth, Paul Rand and Jan Tschichold.

Table of Contents

A set of 18 splendid and colorful looking 3D RSS-Icons. They are done with 3d Studio Max. JPG.

Screenshot

In Font Clock 12 different fonts are printed within the mechanism of a clock, providing a random, mixed display of graphic language within a single time piece. Designed by Sebastian Wrong.

Font Clock

One pixel notched corners as used by Google Analytics. Instead of each option being boxed in a clickable rectangle, there is a 1px notch in each corner. It's not necessarily a curved corner, but it is a little softer than a normal box. Nice little trick.

Screenshot

Hartija is a CSS print framework which is an attempt to unite best CSS printing practices into one single CSS-file.

Rather than standard website templates, a free admin template is nearly impossible to find. This is an admin template which you can use for web applications like online-shops or CMS.

Screenshot

Fully Personal Interface research is a survey where people are questioned about their interface preferences. Results: labels and icons should be placed on the left, horizontal menus are more popular than vertical ones.

Fully Personal Interface Research

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