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Smashing Community WordPress Theme: Vote Now!

Last tuesday, we invited you to participate in the Smashing Community WordPress theme event, in which you would tell us what icons you want and we would design them for you together with the guys behind PSD To WordPress (who have redesigned their web-site a couple of days ago). We express our sincere gratitude for the engagement of our readers, the useful feedback and the support. Thank you!

And as last time, we were overwhelmed by the amount of ideas and suggestions. Overall, we received over 500 comments in our announcement post. It was also the reason why we took more time than expected to identify theme ideas. We picked over 185 (!) suggestions, combined them according to similarity and ranked them in order of popularity. We ended up with the seven most popular ideas.

And now it is your turn to decide which WordPress theme we should design. Please vote for your favorite set in the poll below. And please spread the word so that as many users as possible can participate, so that the set that is truly most wanted by the community is chosen. You have 72 hours.

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Smashing Community WordPress Theme: Comment and Win!

While the Smashing Community icon set is being designed and prepared for the release, we would like to ask your opinion about the WordPress theme that you would like us to design. And here’s how it works: you tell us what Wordpress-theme you need, and then we design it together with PSD to WordPress and release it for free.

And to make it a bit more interesting, we’ll smash three commenters with original nerdy laptop sleeves. To participate, just suggest an idea for a great useful WordPress-theme in the comments to this post. Details after the jump.

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The Smashing Book: Vote For Topics Now!

The Smashing Book project is coming along. At the end of February we announced our most interesting (and important) project for 2009: “The Smashing Book,” a smashingly written, beautifully designed and professionally printed book. We asked for your opinion about what the topics of the book should be, your wishes and ideas, and we were completely overwhelmed with the huge amount of great ideas and suggestions in our Smashing Book Forum. We express sincere gratitude to all those who helped us and discussed various ideas in the forum.

The book will definitely cover the following topics: the Smashing Magazine story, prototyping and wireframing, typography guide, color theory and practical examples, usability, performance optimization and business and freelancing guide (starting your own business).

Of course, this isn't everything. Many more topics can be covered in the book, and you can decide what topics should be covered in the book. Please vote in the poll below!

We took some time to go through all the suggestions and ideas, analyze them, find common interests and determine what you expect from the book and how it should look to meet your expectations. And now it's time to get a little bit more concrete in the second round of the Smashing Book project.

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Hardware Giveaway: 5,000 Comments Challenge!

Update (27/02): we received 9000 comments – we hit the 5,000 mark! And the winners are: 1) graphic card goes to Joshua Lawson (#5533) from Sewell, NJ; 2) the mouse goes to Gareth (#5651) from Cape Town, South Africa; 3) the headphones go to Catalin (#8598) from Bucharest, Romania. Congratulations! All winners have already been contacted.

If you didn't win, it may make sense for you to subscribe to our RSS-feed, more giveaways are coming! Thank you for participation!

Why should you get gifts only on Christmas and your birthday? We at Smashing Magazine love to give away things all year long. This time, you have a chance to get some really cool hardware.

Taking part in this giveaway is easy... well, maybe not that easy. We're keen on seeing a lot of comments and want to see at least 5,000 comments in this post, so spread the word and help us get to 5,000 or more comments and then win one of the smashing prizes below.

The 5,000 comment challenge is important, folks. If we don't reach that goal, then the prizes get torched. Okay, they don't get torched, but the giveaway only kicks in after 5000 comments. It is not a random, unrealistic figure either; we got 3,800 comments in our recent books giveaway.

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Books Giveaway: Winners

Last week we announced a books giveaway (the page take minutes to load) — we were giving away 10 professional web design-related books that cover the topics CSS, usability, user interface design, innovation, web navigation, web form design and JavaScript programming.

We genuinely appreciate our community and respect our readers for reading us, and now we wanted to give something back. Over 3,500 readers participated in the giveaway. And the winners are now announced in this post.

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25 Powerful Children Portraits

Today is the Blog Action Day. Today bloggers all across the globe are uniting and publishing posts related to poverty. We want to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause. Smashing Magazine strongly believes that together we can make a difference by informing people about the problem and donating money to charitable organizations.

We considered various options for this post: we could showcase designs or posters related to poverty, or we could scour the Web for poverty-related icons and wallpapers. But we decided to do something different. We decided to prove that each of us can help make poverty history.

For this purpose we collected beautiful portraits of children who lived in poverty but are now supported by charitable organizations. These photos were shot by photographers, photojournalists and organizations who have tried to improve the conditions of children in poor countries. The money these organizations raised gave these children hope, a future, something to rely on and something to believe in. There are millions of children out there who need your help. And you can help them by donating to the Global Fund and donating to Kiva.

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Books Giveaway: Comment and Win!

As you may or may not know, we like to smash things. Apart from releasing free icons, themes and wallpapers, every now and again we pick a dozen of professional design and web-development-books, buy them and give them away to our readers — for free, of course. We genuinely appreciate our community and respect our readers for reading us, and now we are giving something back.

Two Days Left To Enter Guest Author Contest

We would like to remind you that the deadline for our guest author contest is approaching. Best guest articles will be published on Smashing Magazine with the link to the author’s site. The best guest post will be awarded with Apple MacBook Air. Apart from that then further writers will be awarded with designer laptop sleeves, bags and books.

Participation is easy. To get a chance to win one of the prizes it's enough to submit a short discussion article (max. 1200 characters) or an original and beautiful top-10-list. Further details, rules and awards can be found in the original article. We have received 90 entries so far. Thanks to all participants!

The main idea behind the contest is not to get as many guest articles as possible, but to find talented guest authors who will want to work with us after the contest and get properly paid for their work. If you would like to write for us beyond the contest — drop us a line, we’ll figure something out.

Two days are left. You can submit your article and top-10-list until 23:59, 5th of August 2008.

Get creative, folks!

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Write a Guest Post and Win Apple MacBook Air

As you may know, we are looking for motivated, talented and professional guest authors. And we are paying each author $100-300 per post — depending on the quality of the delivered article. If you think that you are one of them contact us — we want you, we need you, we can't live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team.

And to spark your interest for writing we've decided to announce a guest author contest — write a small guest article for Smashing Magazine and win one of dozens of attractive prizes waiting for you.

Best guest articles will be published on Smashing Magazine with the link to the author's site. The best guest post will be determined by the editorial team and will be awarded with Apple MacBook Air, a compact, ultrathin 13.3" laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive) released by Apple few months ago.

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We Have Won Webinale Awards 2008!

In April we have written that Smashing Magazine has been nominated for the Most Valuable Design Website in the Webinale Awards 2008, the award of an international Web conference Webinale which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 26 - 28. The competition awards most useful and innovative sites related to design and technology. We believed that together with thousands of further smashing readers you can make a difference. And indeed, you made a difference.

Good news for you and for us, folks: we have won the Webinale Awards 2008. We have competed against the prominent CSSBeauty and AListApart, but your support was literally overwhelming. As the prize we have won 5.000 € which we would like to invest in the Smashing Magazine to be able to publish more useful, creative and inspirational articles and release more free high-quality icons, fonts and Wordpress themes.

We express sincere gratitude to each and every one of you out there, in the wild designer's landscape across the globe — for voting for us and supporting us in the competition. Without you we definitely would not win the award. Your support means a lot for us, we appreciate it and we are going to pay you back. Thank you!

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Vote for us on Webinale Awards 2008!

Smashing Magazine has been nominated for the Most Valuable Design Website in the Webinale Awards 2008, the award of an international Web conference Webinale which will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 26 - 28. The competition awards most useful and innovative sites related to design and technology.

We’re competing against CSSBeauty and AListApart which are probably long way ahead of us. However, we believe that together with thousands of further smashing readers you can make a difference. The winner will get 5.000 € which we would invest in the Smashing Magazine to be able to publish more useful, creative and inspirational articles and release more free high-quality icons, fonts and Wordpress themes.

In order to participate you need to select us and click on "Jetzt abstimmen" (German, means "Vote now" in English) at the bottom of the page. Please notice: the voting closes April 24, 2008; you can vote once every 24 hours, as determined by your IP address.

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Raise The Curtain For… Smashing Jobs

A job board? Right. Not a big thing compared to Einsteins theory of relativity. But in the universe of web-developers where most of us use to live, Smashing Jobs may turn out to be a pretty good damn thing. In fact, it has benefits for both job seekers and employers. And you can also use our promotion code to post your job openings for free. So let's find out what's in there for you.

If you are a creative person, no matter if you are seeking actively for a job or not, you may get some fresh opportunities for your career or your order books. Since Smashing Jobs is fully integrated into Smashing Magazine you can immediately scan recent job openings while reading our latest article.

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