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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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25 Brilliant Animated Short Movies

Animated short movies are excellent for tedious coffee breaks and uninspiring monday mornings. To put some beautiful story in a short 2-5 minutes sequence isn’t easy, but even in this case designers and artists are quite creative and manage to come up with very surprising and unusual results. The selection below is supposed to make you cry, laugh, feel bizarre or even shocked — in every case being absolutely smashed.

Let’s take a look at the collection of 25 brilliant animated short movies. Among them you’ll find funny cartoons, typography-related movies as well as artistic masterpieces — hopefully everybody will find something interesting and unusual for his/her personal taste.

Please take a look at the related articles

• Funny And Creative Animated Videos with funny and touching animated videos and
• Typography in Motion showcases examples of typography embedded into movies and videos.
• 29 Brilliant Music Videos covers original and inspirational music videos,
• Graphics In Motion with beautiful examples of videos in which graphics are set in motion.

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Desktop Wallpaper Calender: March 2008

Creativity is all about being stubborn, reluctant, uncompromising or simply different. Unique ideas are becoming necessary, conformity to standards superflous and pointless. Few weeks ago we’ve published an overview of some (really) stunning desktop wallpapers. Researching for some excellent wallpapers, we’ve stumbled upon Patricia Villanueva’s weblog with her sometimes bold, sometimes intriguing, sometimes crazy, but always creative, unusual and incredibly personal works.

That’s why we’ve contacted Patricia, a 29-year-old graphics designer from Mexico-City, and asked her to create English versions of her monthly desktop wallpapers for Smashing Magazine. Patricia agreed. Result: a very special desktop wallpaper calendar for March 2008.

You can download the wallpaper in 4 widescreen resolutions: 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800. A .zip-archive with all resolutions is also packed in a wallpaper-pack and is available for free download.

Please notice: we are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. You don’t know it yet, but your work may be featured in one of our upcoming posts.

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Best Of February 2008

Every month we take a look around and select some of the most interesting web-development-related web-sites. We read articles, check out tools, analyze the advantages of new resources. Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 30 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in February 2008.

All images can be clicked and lead to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken.

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