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5 Principles And Ideas Of Setting Type On The Web

There are some basic approaches, guidelines and goals to consider when working with type on the Web. Overall, the medium of Web typography involves readability, accessibility, usability, and brandability. On the Web, these aspects function together to accomplish design’s goals of communication and user interaction.

There are many ways to approach Web typography in order to create effective and expressive results. Let’s take a closer look at some principles, rules and ideas for approaching Web typography decisions — you can use them as a starting point for learning how to achieve effective type setting on the Web.

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Inspirational PDF Magazines

PDF magazines are a great promotional tool used by companies and collectives. They are quick to put together, can be attached to emails, or made available as free downloads. Numerous visual arts publications from around the world are available for you to draw inspiration from. These magazines serve as excellent sources of both conceptual and visual design. Furthermore, it’s both interesting and important to know what other artists do — to explore new artistic style, learn new techniques and make new contacts.

View great illustration, photography, graphic design, painting, typography, and various other visual and communication arts. Dig into ideas with artist interviews and articles. Or flip through these pages to discover new visual solutions and styles. Below you’ll find both well-established and new PDF magazines for you to download and to draw inspiration from.

You may also want to consider visiting

• the post 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read which presents an overview of over 40 established international design/tech-related magazines, blogs and resources.

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Celebration Of Vintage and Retro Design

Retro and vintage designs are often considered as being outdated, looking old, unattractive and dull. That’s not true. Although compared to modern design, retro is mostly a completely different realm, it has a large variety of benefits modern graphic designers often tend to overlook. And that’s a pity. Because we, as designers, can learn a lot from it.

Nostalgic designs arise feelings, awake memories and better manage to involve broad range of readers even although they don’t really realize it. Furthermore, retro can look cool and offer readers or visitors something they haven’t expected at all. So why not try to impress them with some impressive vintage art for a change?

Below you’ll find the celebration of retro and vintage design — ads, illustrations, book covers, pins and posters from 1920-1980s. The images weren’t necessarily created in the mid of 20th century. Vintage is living today which is why this post also features artists and designers who make use of the vintage and retro style in their works.

Please notice: if after reading this post you’ll experience some need for buying ice cream, chewing gum or eating sausages, it’s not our fault.

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Vote for us on Webinale Awards 2008!

Smashing Magazine has been nominated for the Most Valuable Design Website in the Webinale Awards 2008, the award of an international Web conference Webinale which will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 26 - 28. The competition awards most useful and innovative sites related to design and technology.

We’re competing against CSSBeauty and AListApart which are probably long way ahead of us. However, we believe that together with thousands of further smashing readers you can make a difference. The winner will get 5.000 € which we would invest in the Smashing Magazine to be able to publish more useful, creative and inspirational articles and release more free high-quality icons, fonts and Wordpress themes.

In order to participate you need to select us and click on “Jetzt abstimmen” (German, means “Vote now” in English) at the bottom of the page. Please notice: the voting closes April 24, 2008; you can vote once every 24 hours, as determined by your IP address.

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Fresh Freebies: Typeface, Pirates and Circular Icons

Free stuff always comes in handy. We are regularly hunting for free high-quality icons, fonts, wallpapers, plugins and scripts and present them to you, so you don’t need to search for them. As long as we find something beautiful, interesting or useful, we let you know in our posts. And now it’s time for some sweet freebies for designer’s toolbox.

Below you’ll find an excellent free font and some recently released icon sets. They all are released for free; however, please take a look at license agreements before using them in commercial applications.

You can also take a look at our previous article

• Friday Freebies: Font, Icons and Wallpapers which presents a high-quality font, high-resolution wallpapers and icons as well as a free WordPress admin theme.

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Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas

Web form is often the main communication channel between visitors and site owners. Feedback is always important which is why it’s necessary to make sure that web forms are easy to understand and intuitive to use. Nevertheless, even in form design one can afford some healthy portion of creativity.

Web forms don’t have to be boring and, using CSS or Flash, you can easily make sure that they are appealing and effective. To get noticed, you need to come up with something unique and interesting — symbols, icons, colors, position or the size of web form are often used to achieve interesting design solutions. We’ve searched for some examples and we’ve found them. Creative, original and unusual web forms.

Below we present over 40 (really) beautiful examples of web forms as well as modern solutions and creative ideas related to web form design. Some of the examples are Flash-based; however, in most cases you can easily create similar designs with pure CSS and (X)HTML.

Also consider our previous article

• CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions which lists modern solutions for CSS-based form design.

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