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.

  • Getting Creative With Transparency in Web Design

    Arm yourself with the knowledge of how different file types of images can be used to achieve transparency on web-pages. It’s important to first understand these basics. Then learn how to push the limitations of browser support. Take a look at what others are doing with transparency on the Web; only then you’ll be able to learn how to get creative with transparency in Web design.

    Jeff Croft

    There are well-established methods of imitating Web transparency that have been developed to overcome browser support issues. While we can appreciate past solutions, it’s important to break out of this faux methodology and learn to work with PNG graphics. We are at a tipping point where IE7 continues to grab market share. And fortunately, IE7 has thet support for full Alpha Transparent PNG graphics. In the near future, transparent PNG graphics will have excellent browser support.

    Ultimately, it’s necessary to consider creative uses for transparency on the Web. This article reviews the use of faux transparency methods, presents examples of transparent images on both fixed and dynamic backgrounds, and points to creative solutions that take full creative advantage of today’s modern Web transparency effects.

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  • 60 More AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding

    When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

    Nevertheless, it’s important to know what’s possible, particularly since you can develop new ideas further, improving the quality of your web applications. Since our last article 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding many things have changed — new scripts were introduced, new creative solutions were developed, new robust development kits have been released. They all are supposed to serve a better user experience and provide more comfort for web-developers.

    Ajax Script

    This post presents over 60 new useful Ajax scripts, libraries and solutions which you can use in your future projects. License agreements can change from time to time — please read them carefully before using the script in a commercial web-application.

    You might want to consider checking out the following related posts:

    Please notice: the overview presented below is not just a yet-another-one-collection of Ajax-scripts. It’s a collection of really useful ones, the ones you can use in almost every project you’ll be working on.

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  • Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks

    Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout.

    Book Covers - Book Covers

    The main idea of this post is to provide you with some creative, expressive and appealing book covers. You won’t like all of them, but you’ll definitely find some designs which are worth pondering upon.

    You may be interested in the following posts we’ve published earlier:

    • Breathtaking Typographic Posters with 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.
    • Award-Winning Newspaper Designs with examples of outstanding newspaper designs collected from dozens of countries.
    • Data Visualization and Infographics showcases spectacular data visualizations and infographics which manage to combine a strong visual appeal with the effective presentation of information.
    • Data Visualization: Modern Approaches presents interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

    Please keep in mind: there are thousands of excellent book covers; we’ve selected only few ones which are excellent in our humble opinion. Although this selection is definitely subjective, we’ve tried to do our best to find interesting designs which make the book cover hard to forget. If you have further suggestions please comment on this post. All covers posted are the copyright of their respective holders.

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  • Free Fonts Of The Month: GrauBlau, Nevis

    April 10th, 2008 in Fonts | 44 Comments

    Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

    Absolut Pro

    This month we’re glad to present you GrauBlau, Nevis, Countries of Europe and a five excellent reduced fonts designed by the Ingofonts foundry. Please read the license agreements carefully - they can change from time to time.

    • Free Fonts Of March feature M+ Outline, GeoBats, FF Unit Rounded Bold and IPAP Fonts Family.
    • You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts.

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  • Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas

    According to classic principles of web design, everything at the bottom of the page isn’t that important. Most users think like that. And most designers are convinced that this is true. Site elements at the bottom of the page aren’t really able to catch visitors’ attention which is why footers are often forgotten or ignored and not given the attention they deserve.

    In fact, most footers are rather boring and uninspiring. Designers often use the bottom area to mention everything they haven’t found place for at the top of the site. E.g. disclaimers, W3C-buttons, copyright, “back to the top”-link and contact details. But if most designers forget it, why don’t make use of it? Why don’t use footers to impress visitors with something they actually don’t expect at all?

    Footers - volll

    This post presents creative examples of footers and ideas for footer design. We’ve tried to identify some trends and some interesting approaches you may want to use or develop further in your projects.

    You might also want to take a look at the posts

    Basically, footers need to provide users with the information they are looking for. This is why contact details and a brief information about site or / and site owners needs to be placed in the footer. Corporate designs may need to provide driving directions, telephone number, a web form or at least an e-mail.

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  • Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy

    Handwriting seems to have lost some of its attraction over the last years. Nobody writes beautiful handwritten letters, and uses digital means of communication with smileys, abbreviations and standard lettering instead. And that’s a pity. Since handwriting is unique, it has a tremendous expressive power a standard lettering isn’t able to achieve.

    More than that, handwritten text can be incredibly gorgeous. In fact, there is nothing more valuable than a beautiful handwritten letter sent to your beloved ones. And this post attempts to prove just that.

    Lettering and Handwriting - British Ariways B/W Font

    In the overview below you’ll find excellent examples of beautiful handwriting, creative lettering and professional calligraphy. It’s really amazing to see what one can create out of simple letters drawn with a pencil on a small piece of paper.

    For further typographic inspiration you can browse through our previous posts

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Sideblog

Footers can be a place where a designer can let his creative juices flow a little more freely. Christian Watson shows 76 excellent footer designs. More footers.

Footers

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

  • Grab the High-Quality OpenType Free Font Anivers!
  • Grab the Dilectio WordPress Theme!
  • Grab the Smashing WordPress Theme!