The year is slowly coming to an end and we're glad to present to you a festive icon set to inspire you in your designs. In this post we present a minimalist collection of 20 free festive vector (.EPS) icons created by offset media. The pack includes color and grayscale versions. The pack includes mostly Christmas related icons, such us the gingerbread man, nutcracker, snowman and the very well-known fir tree.
The icon set is completely free to use in personal and commercial projects without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. Also, feel free to also have a look at some of our previous Smashing Christimas icon sets: Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set by Icon Eden (2009) and Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set by SoftFacade (2008).
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The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows: "Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance."
This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy.
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Computing is full of buzzwords, “cloud computing” being the latest one. But unlike most trends that fizzle out after the initial surge, cloud computing is here to stay. This article goes over Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and guides you to implementing a WordPress plugin that backs up your WordPress database to Amazon’s S3 cloud. Note that this is not a tutorial on creating a WordPress plugin from scratch, so some familiarity with plugin development is assumed.
The reason for using Amazon S3 to store important data follows from the “3-2-1” backup rule, coined by Peter Krogh. According to the 3-2-1 rule, you would keep three copies of any critical data: the original data, a backup copy on removable media, and a second backup at an off-site location (in our case, Amazon’s S3 cloud).
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Many of us rely on open source tools, technologies and standards to help improve the work we do on a daily basis. None of this would however be possible without the hard work, commitment and dedication that others, just like you, have invested in giving back to the Web community over the past two decades.
Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate and jQuery are just a few examples of well known projects which were born from a desire to put something out there that could help others on the Web do more. These projects evolved because developers started using them and thought, “Hey, I could do something to help make this better. I bet it could save someone else’s time if I shared this with the world.”
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We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration. This post features 30 free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for November 2011. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!
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PHP is widely available with inexpensive hosting plans, which makes it a popular choice for developers who write software for the Web. From big platforms, such as WordPress, down to small scripts, such as ones to display image galleries or to send forms to email, thousands of script and products are out there written in PHP that can be installed and used even if you don’t know much about PHP yourself.
I have been a PHP developer for 10 years, and my company has developed a content management system, written in PHP, that is intended to be very simple to install and get started with. So, I spend a lot of time working with designers who are installing a PHP script for the first time. If you are installing a script and something goes wrong, PHP can be incredibly infuriating.
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In this article, I’d like to reacquaint you with the humble workhorse of communication that is the paragraph. Paragraphs are everywhere. In fact, at the high risk of stating the obvious, you are reading one now. Despite their ubiquity, we frequently neglect their presentation. This is a mistake. Here, we’ll refer to some time-honored typesetting conventions, with an emphasis on readability, and offer guidance on adapting them effectively for devices and screens. We’ll see that the ability to embed fonts with @font-face is not by itself a solution to all of our typographic challenges.
In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee circulated a document titled “HTML Tags,” which outlined just 20 tags, many of which are now obsolete or have taken other forms. The first surviving tag to be defined in the document, after the crucial anchor tag, is the paragraph tag. It wasn’t until 1993 that a discussion emerged on the proposed image tag.
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In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice. “People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.” Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate.
Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.
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