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

60 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design

Typography is more than being legible and looking good. Among other things, effective typography manages to achieve two important objectives: a) to create an appropriate atmosphere and enable users to develop trust toward the site and b) to make sure visitors get the main message of the site and (if possible) become interested in the services offered on the site. Since written text is the most efficient instrument to communicate with visitors precisely and directly, the power of typography shouldn’t be underestimated.

To communicate effectively, typography requires appropriate typefaces. Last year we’ve presented 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design, a selection of excellent typefaces one should be aware of when developing web-sites. Now it’s time to update our selection with typefaces we’ve missed then and new typefaces which have been developed over the last year.

Below you’ll find over 60 first-class typefaces for corporate design. Please notice that they are not free; however, we’ve focused on typefaces which are definitely worth spending money on. So which typefaces are “bulletproof”? What fonts can be used effectively in almost every Corporate Design? And what are the options for unique, but still incredibly beautiful typefaces? Let’s find out.

You might also want to take a look at the

• post 40 Free Fonts For Professional Design and
• at the section Fonts which has a number of typography-related posts.

Read more...

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: Join in!

Few weeks ago we’ve presented a wallpaper calender for March 2008 — a desktop wallpaper designed by Patricia Villanueva, a 29-year-old graphics designer from Mexico-City. We’ve stumbled upon Patricia’s works which have impressed us by her bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but genuinely creative and unusual style. Being fair, we would also like to give you the opportunity to present your work in our magazine.

A desktop wallpaper from our recent selection.

The wallpapers will be published in the beginning of every month for the next 12 months. Notice that we respect the ideas and motivation behind artists’ work which is why we give you the full freedom to explore your creativity through your work. And this is also why the theme of the wallpaper isn’t anyhow influenced by us, but designed from scratch by yourself.

Read more...

Adobe Fireworks Tutorials and Downloads - Best of

Adobe Fireworks is the industry leader for prototyping and rapid site building. Some of you may not be aware of this, as you may be using Photoshop for each phase of web-site production. The articles, tutorials, and resources gathered here will convince you of the power of this application.

For rapid prototyping and site layouts Adobe Fireworks is definitely an option worth considering.

Fireworks is an optimal tool for quickly prototyping and building web-sites. It is more intuitive and more light-weight compared to other titans of the industry. It is also included in the Adobe’s Creative Suite 3. Below you’ll find Fireworks tutorials which will help you to improve your skills and become more efficient when designing web-sites. Hopefully, they’ll also help you to produce professional and maintainable results.

You might also want to take a look at the following tutorials round-ups which we’ve presented in our previous posts:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best of
  This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works.
• Adobe Illustrator Tutorials: Best Of
  A collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers.
• Adobe Flash Tutorials: Best Of
  Hand-picked professional Adobe Flash tutorials.
• Tutorials Round-Up
  Over 200 Ajax, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, XML as well as ASP, C++, Perl, Python and Java tutorials.

Read more...

Laptop Sleeves, Skins and Stickers

Sometimes laptop is more than just a device. Using laptops over years, some of us tend to develop a genuine affection toward their little (or not so little) companions. We take care of them, putting them in a nice hand-made fabric, spicing them up with some fancy outfit and providing them with a personality using laptop skins. That’s not as bad as it sounds, and there are many ways to use laptop decoration (or laptops decorated by other people) as a source of inspiration. In some way you may also call it laptop art.

In this issue of monday inspiration series we provide you with some fresh ideas to spice up your environment with laptop skins, engravings, sleeves, cases and stickers. In the end of this post you’ll also find some experimental ideas for laptop decoration — caution, you don’t really want to replicate them at home or at office — well, at least if you care about your laptop.

Apparently, Apple geeks are far more emotional when it comes to accessories for their laptops — although we’ve tried to cover as many different ideas as possible, in the selection below many of the presented ideas are used on Macs. There is nothing we can do about it, really.

Read more...

Friday Freebies: Font, Icons and Wallpapers

Free stuff always comes in handy. Particularly if it offers a high quality one would usually expect from a quite costly commercial product. The latter holds particularly when it comes to typefaces and icon packs. On the other hand, when you are looking for some excellent desktop wallpapers to spark your creativity, it’s just damn hard to find the good ones. Well, not any longer.

Below you’ll find some excellent friday freebies — a high-quality font, high-resolution wallpapers and icons as well as a free WordPress admin theme. If you have any further suggestions please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments.

You might want to check out the following articles we’ve published earlier:

• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
  Stunning desktop wallpapers related to typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes.
• 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
  Amazing free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop.
• 100 Excellent Free WordPress themes
  Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested. They all can be used for free in personal and commercial projects.
• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
  An overview of over 40 excellent free fonts you might use for your professional designs in 2008.

Read more...

Showcase Of Creative Flash Preloaders

When it comes to Flash, images, animation, videos and sound effects are often used on large scale. Consequence: in most cases Flash takes quite much time to load and requires a good dose of patience from users. Users know it and are often willing to give a Flash-site some time to load. However, to count on user’s patience, Flash-designers need to inform site visitors how much patience is actually required. If it isn’t done, the latter have no anchor point to estimate how much more time is needed and consequently close the browser window thinking that the site simply doesn’t work properly.

In this post you’ll find some creative Flash-preloaders which may serve as an inspiration for your Flash-projects. Please notice that sometimes you need to look closely and precisely in order to find the preloader. Depending on the server load and your connection preloaders may quickly disappear. In most cases it’s not a disadvantage — well, at least it shouldn’t be.

Please notice that

• you might also want to take a look at the article 65 excellent Flash-designs we’ve published earlier,
• this selection is not ultimate and isn’t supposed to be the best of; it is intended to provide you with some ideas for creating your Flash-preloaders once you need to — please share your favourite Flash-preloaders in the comments to this post.

Read more...