This week we have a beautiful icon freebie for you. BanzaiTokyo designed this art related icon set. Their collection of 34 icons are an homage to the creative professions. The icons are available as PNG files and released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
The Art Professions Icons set would not be out of place in an artist's portfolio website, be they cook or painter — or even multi-talented. Imagine these icons guiding a modern art gallery's visitor through the institution's online presence and you won't feel let down.
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jQuery, Prototype, Node.js, Backbone.js, Mustache and thousands of JavaScript microlibraries all combine into a single undeniable fact: JavaScript is popular. It’s so popular, in fact, that we often find ourselves using it in places where another solution might be better in the long run.
Even though we keep JavaScript, CSS and HTML in different files, the concepts behind progressive enhancement are getting all knotted up with every jQuery plugin we use and with every weird technique that crops up. Because JavaScript is so powerful, there are a lot of overlaps in capability between JavaScript and HTML (building document structure) and JavaScript and CSS (injecting style information).
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Which category does your organization’s Web presence fall into? Over- or under-managed? When it comes to the Web, few organizations have found the Goldilocks zone. Their online activities are either under-managed with minimal policies and procedures, or dogged by bureaucracy and internal politics.
Those that fall into the former category are vulnerable to legal threats, internal disputes and knee-jerk management where the website lurches from one crisis to the next. Those in the latter are crippled by indecision and fail to respond to the fast-changing nature of the Web.
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The ambigram is one of the few modern letterforms that engage both your intellect and intuition simultaneously. It reads as a word while also communicating a deeply familiar pattern. This is something beyond the ambigram’s obviously clever construction. I’ve thought quite a bit about why I love this word-image hybrid, and I’ll set out here to uncover just what it is about the ambigram’s design and structure that makes it so captivating.
My primary design background is as a symbolic logo designer, so I begin with what I know: symbols. I look to nature to create my work as a matter of practicality as well as aesthetics, because symbols are derived from nature and are the first language of all humans. Symbols engage us deeply as expressions of the organic principles and forms that life embodies. Nature is common to everyone, and when it is used symbolically in visual language, the chance of creating a relationship with the audience is significantly elevated because it mirrors the relationships within and around us. Nature even embeds symbols that mirror universal processes directly in our DNA.
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WordPress is one of the most deployed content management systems around. One of the main reasons is the number of plugins available and the ease with which we can use the system. It is not uncommon to find websites using tens of plugins to accomplish various tasks and functions. Wouldn't it be nice if you could share the site content with other websites?
You may have a need to share advertisements, product information or your photo gallery if you are a designer. Whatever the reason, this article will show you how to create an embeddable content plugin to share your WordPress content with other websites.
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When you’re working in Fireworks — be it for a website design, mobile design or graphic asset for a project — one need you will undoubtedly have is support for textures. While Fireworks is an amazing tool in other areas, the usability of the textures feature could definitely be improved. In this article, we’ll look at an extension that does just that — the Texture panel.
Currently in Fireworks, you can apply textures (which are pulled from your “Textures” folder) to whatever vector shape you’re working on. Unfortunately, the way Fireworks lists textures isn’t as intuitive (or fast) as it could be.
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Editor's note: This is an introductory article about a book idea to be published by Smashing Magazine with Chris Heilmann. Check out what we propose as an idea — explaining a way to reconsider how we build websites to ensure they are leaner and more future-proof. At the end of the article, we'd ask you to fill out a quick survey to show your interest.
The Web as it is now is suffering from an obesity problem. If you surf the Web on a flaky mobile connection or some hotel wireless, you'll find yourself a lot of times staring at a page or app that doesn't do anything and doesn't tell you what is going on either. The spinner in the tab or the URL bar seems to be the thing that gets the most mileage in browsers.
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In Web design, as one of the seemingly few markets that is actually growing, job opening postings are common. They're not all equally convincing, though. In fact, most of them are unpleasant, uninviting and sometimes bordering on hostile. Some, however, are great, and give you an honest and pleasant sense of what it's like to work at the studio in question, and, in the best cases, what makes a good designer.
By looking at some good and some bad lists of job requirements, I'll explore some of their strengths and weaknesses and try to pinpoint what makes the best lists inviting and honest introductions.
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We have a delicate and useful icon set for you, again. Dutch designers from Dutch Icon created a new set of 42 Pika-style vector icons, released with Smashing Magazine for the Web design community. The icons are available as PNG (in two sizes) and AI source files. The icons are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
You may be looking to brighten up your checkout page with a more original shopping cart icon or perhaps you're designing a website from scratch that requires a shrimp icon. Either way, if your budget is limited and you need a wide array of different icons, this set of chunky pixel-perfect icon might be just what you need.
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