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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December 2008

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 55 free December desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe and sent to us by the designers themselves. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded and used for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what have we received for December?

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Creative Calendar Designs

How many creative solutions for calendar design are out there? If you take a look around you'll find out that most calendars are designed in a "standard" linear fashion. Calendar cards usually have the same structure: the month is designed in bold while the days are placed below within a rigid grid structure. Well, it doesn't have to be like this. In fact, there are a number of creative approaches one can consider when designing calendars.

Indeed, designers sometimes risk unique design solutions. However, unusual design is not necessarily a good design. It is important that your calendar design reveals function and remains usable. Function is more important than the design. In fact, some designs listed below may be not that user-friendly, but they may serve as a nice starting point and give you some fresh ideas for your future designs.

This post showcases creative examples of calendar design. We have tried to include creative, visually appealing and interesting design solutions. Hopefully, everybody will find something interesting and unusual for herself or himself.

Please notice: this post is rather about information visualization than nice graphics design. Some nice calendar graphic designs have already been collected. Our goal was different: to present some creative concepts for calendar designs and calendar systems.

You may want to take a look at our related posts

• Beautiful Brochures and Booklets
• Data Visualization and Infographics
• Beautiful and Expressive Packaging Design

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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: June 2008

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That's why we've decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we've decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn't it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 15 free desktop wallpapers, designed by 15 designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for May?

Read more...

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: May 2008

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why since April 2008 we supply you with fresh desktop wallpapers. And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 17 19 free desktop wallpapers with calendars, created by designers across the globe for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded and used for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
• Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: April 2008 features desktop wallpapers from the last month.

So what wallpapers have we received for May?

Read more...

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: April 2008

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That's why we've decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over the next 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we've decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn't it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 15 free desktop wallpapers, designed by 15 designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for April? Do you also think that there's just not enough pink pandas on computer wallpapers out there?

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.

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Gallery Of Date Stamps And Calendars

Designer's attention to small details often has a significant impact on how visitors perceive the overall design of a web-site. Although users' main focus usually lies on finding information, it's nice to find the content being supported by finest visual details. This holds for favicons, shopping carts, pagination and tag clouds we've covered in our earlier posts. But it also holds for... well, date stamps and calendars. Apparently, the latter are used not only in weblogs, but also on large web-sites where events, news and any kind of time-planning is involved.

In such designs a tear-off calendar is often used to symbolize the date in a most intuitive way. However, it's not always the case. In fact, designers seem to experiment with a number of different approach one wouldn't really expect from such a tiny design element. Out collection of appealing and interesting calendar icons and date stamps is supposed to prove it. It might provide you with some fresh ideas once you need to design some original date stamp, but don't know where to start from. All images are clickable.

Some of presented examples may not look nice at the first glance, but they all have some idea behind them — an idea you may use and develop further.

You might want to check out the following articles as well:

• Favicons: The Delicate Beauties
• Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Pagination Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Shopping Cart: Examples and Good Practices

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Online Calendars and Date Pickers

Calendars always come in handy. Whether you are planning a schedule for your next project, manage your appointments or simply want to keep track on events you are going to take part in — to get things done in time you need a clear, simple and user-friendly time line. The more flexible your calendars are, the more effectively you can work with them. E.g. setting up your milestones, defining your deadlines and shifting your time line once unexpected problems occur. Besides, if you can get notified once the deadline is coming up or update the data once you stuck in the traffic then your calendar can turn out to be a real life-saver and boost your effectiveness.

Online calendars can also be useful if you'd like to publish your schedule or share it with your colleagues instantly — instead of sending hundreds of e-mails via a mailing list. Or if you'd like to provide your visitors with a date picker — e.g. for your web form. In fact, online calendar services, scripts, tools and software applications are useful for everybody.

This post presents a detailed overview of calendar scripts (Ajax, PHP, DHTML etc.), applications, tools and related services, including CSS-styling of online calendars and web-services you can use to generate a printable weekly planners and monthly and yearly calendars for free.

• You can find more AJAX-code snippets in our article 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding.

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80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding

• To understand the idea behind AJAX, you should read Jesse James Garrett's article "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" and Wikipedia: Ajax;
• to learn the basics of AJAX, you should go through some AJAX tutorials we've presented previously;
• to learn more about professional CSS coding, you should visit 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding;
• and to get a powerful and handy CSS-Toolbox for your future projects, you can use 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without.

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