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The Secrets Of Grunge Design

Shiny and glossy design elements are now officially outdated. Just like retro is becoming trendy again, grungy look appears to rapidly gain on popularity. And there is a damn good reason behind it. In our everyday environment we’re unlikely to find ideal geometric forms or pretty shadow effects as they are manifested by glorious Web 2.0-designs. The reality is different, and Web is definitely not an exception here.

Therefore designers often tend to explore the less ideal and more realistic design solutions which reflect the world we’re living in more accurately and precisely. Result: such elements give the design a more realistic, genuine look, a look one would actually expect in real life.

In such grunge designs dirty stains, torn images, “broken” icons and creased pieces of paper are as popular as hand-drawn elements and dirty textures. The main purpose of hand-drawn elements lies in their ability to convey a personality and an individual note. And dirty textures are often used as background images for navigation menus, photos and overall layouts. Usually these elements are regular objects from our daily life, replicated in their real form without any glossy effects.

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35 Fantastic HDR Pictures

Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. In graphics HDR imaging is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. This is usually achieved by modifying photos with image processing software for tone-mapping. And the results can be really incredible; in fact, many artists and designers come up with some pretty fancy results.

This post covers 35 extremely beautiful and perfectly executed HDR-pictures. Some of them might look surreal, too colorful, even magic or fake, but they are not — keep in mind that they’ve all been developed out of usual photos, and not a single image is an illustration.

Please notice:

• the selection isn’t supposed to be complete which is why we encourage you to post links to further excellent HDR images in the comments to this post;
• there is no ranking, all pictures have been selected due to their outstanding quality and excellent execution;
• you can explore further works of the designers and photographers we’ve featured below by browsing through their sets on Flickr;
• all screenshots are clickable and lead to the pages from which they’ve been taken,
• you might want to take a look at the article (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers we’ve published earlier.

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Free Fonts Of The Month: FF Unit, M+ Outline, GeoBats

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.

This month we’re glad to present you M+ Outline, GeoBats, FF Unit Rounded Bold and IPAP Fonts Family. Please read the license agreements carefully - they can change from time to time.

• You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts.

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35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online.

In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. The result: hundreds and hundreds of sets available almost everywhere, usually not that well executed and often duplicated from other sets. However, there are indeed free high-quality icon sets. And this post is supposed to prove exactly that.

Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons. Some of the listed icons can be used in web designs, some of them are supposed to be primarily for desktop. So hopefully everybody will find something useful.

You might want to take a look at the following articles we’ve presented earlier:

• 20 Free And Fresh Icon Sets
• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs,
• Freebies Round-Up: Icons and Templates

Please notice: not all listed freebies can be used for commercial projects, however you can use all of them in your private projects of for you personal purposes. Please read the disclaimers carefully before using the icons - they’re changing from time to time.

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Blog Headers For Free Download

One month ago we’ve asked our readers to help us create a gallery of blog header graphics which every designer could use for free and without any restrictions whatsoever. We’ve announced a Header Graphics Contest and now, one month later, it’s time to present the most interesting, creative and beautiful works we’ve received.

38 graphic designers and artists participated; as a result we’ve received over 100 truly outstanding entries. The best ones are displayed below. Some of the participants will be randomly awarded with Poser 7, Anime Studio, and Manga Studio provided by Smith Micro Graphics. Participants, please stay tuned — we’ll contact the winners within the next 24 hours.

This post presents the results of the contest — 45 beautiful blog header designs you can use for free. Below the designers have described their themes, intentions and shown us some examples of how header graphics can be used.

Please notice that

• often also the source image (.ai or .psd) can be downloaded,
• all images are clickable and lead to the full-size image of the header,
• full-size images have the resolution of 850×200 px,
• and you can also download graphics together with source files using corresponding links in the description.

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Creating A Successful Online Portfolio

Your portfolio is the showcase of your work, your skills and your potential for your future employers. The more time and effort you dedicate for a usable and nice-looking design, the higher are your chances for getting better account balance in the end of the month. So how can you make sure your portfolio is better than the portfolios of your competitors? How can you point employer’s attention to your works?

Creating a successful portfolio is easier than you think. Focus on simplicity, ease of use, hitting your objectives, professionally managing the project, and you’ll end up with a successful portfolio. In this article we’ll review 5 pitfalls that commonly plague portfolio design. Then we’ll cover Portfolio Tips that if carefully considered and well executed will deliver quality results for your portfolio.

There are some common mistakes designers make in their portfolios. Let’s review these common pitfalls first to make sure you don’t fall into one of these traps.

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