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Switch From Print To Web: Where To Start?

By Cameron Chapman, April 16th, 2009 in How-To | 70 Comments

Making the switch from print publishing to digital publishing is a big step. But as costs for everything from paper to shipping increase, making the jump to digital is becoming more appealing to publishers of both newspapers and magazines. It's a complicated process, though, and if not executed effectively, it can leave readers feeling alienated and disenfranchised.

Not exactly what you want, considering that it can be more difficult to attract and retain digital subscribers than to sell something outside of the virtual world. Below we discuss some things to consider when making the switch. Research up front will prevent headaches down the road.

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Inspirational PDF Magazines

By Smashing Editorial, April 22nd, 2008 in Design Showcase | 140 Comments

PDF magazines are a great promotional tool used by companies and collectives. They are quick to put together, can be attached to emails, or made available as free downloads. Numerous visual arts publications from around the world are available for you to draw inspiration from. These magazines serve as excellent sources of both conceptual and visual design. Furthermore, it's both interesting and important to know what other artists do — to explore new artistic style, learn new techniques and make new contacts.

View great illustration, photography, graphic design, painting, typography, and various other visual and communication arts. Dig into ideas with artist interviews and articles. Or flip through these pages to discover new visual solutions and styles. Below you'll find both well-established and new PDF magazines for you to download and to draw inspiration from.

You may also want to consider visiting
- the post 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read which presents an overview of over 40 established international design/tech-related magazines, blogs and resources.
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PDF: Five Smashing Wisdom Treasures

By Smashing Editorial, August 4th, 2007 in How-To | 27 Comments

In our recent posts we've promised to publish the .pdf-versions of the articles you've considered useful and important. We've received many e-mails in which you supported us and asked us for print-friendly versions of five of our articles. Thanks for all the tremendous support we apparently have. It's important to know that what we do is useful. But it is also important to state, how important you are for us.

So now it's time to keep the promise we've given. Below you'll find the .pdf-versions of five of our recent articles.

The .pdf-files of our previous posts included some mistakes - for instance, you couldn't click on the links provided in the article. Besides, the .pdf was presented in the landscape format instead of portrait format. Both issues are fixed in these version. If you find any inconsistencies, please let us know.

You can download five wisdom treasures - print-friendly-versions of our recent articles from the following URLs.

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PDF: 70 Coding Ideas + 80 Design Tips

By Smashing Editorial, May 23rd, 2007 in CSS, How-To | 55 Comments

It doesn't matter, whether you've been working with CSS for years or have started to learn it recently. In both cases expert ideas for CSS coding and creative approaches for professional design are extremely valuable and can turn out to be life-savers in the design process. You might never use some of them, but it's nice to have them right in front of you, on your desk, once you need them. Recently we've published 35 Designers x 5 Questions and 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding, in which we've tried to cover the most important coding and design issues. Afterwards we've received dozens of e-mails, in which you asked us to pack both articles in .pdf-files, so they can easily be printed out for quick reference. And we've promised to do it. In every e-mail we've received.
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Online Converters

By Smashing Editorial, April 10th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 103 Comments

Online converters always come in handy. Once you need to perform some operation with your files, they can save your time achieving the same results online, without installing some specific software. In fact, there are many online tools, which convert formats, files and code snippets for free. Some of them are quite specific tools aimed for developers, but some are common "all-rounders", which manage to convert almost every format to a more popular one. Using them, you can generate .pdf-documents out of images, images out of texts or RSS-feeds out of web-sites. You can also convert any audio- and video-files immediately - the results can be received via e-mail. So what can you use? What should you use? This overview of online-converters for users and developers might give you some useful starting points and improve your productivity.
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Online Generators

By Smashing Editorial, November 9th, 2006 in Developer's Toolbox | 174 Comments

One can discuss whether web-generators are useful or not. On the one hand, they don't challenge our creativity, but on the other hand they make our life easier and save our precious time. However, it doesn't matter really. What matters is that we use them if we have to solve some problem quickly and efficiently. We've taken a look at the most useful online-generators for web-development and listed them below.
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