At SmashingMag, we cherish the idea of lasting traditions—be it monthly desktop wallpapers, editorial newsletters or those weird mystery riddles. So in the spirit of tradition, the riddle had to be based on animated GIFs. During an intensive, unscheduled, battery-recharge brainstorming session, we came up with a number of interesting ideas, all thoroughly written down, tagged and ready for use.
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Gestalt principles are important to understand. They sit at the foundation of everything we do visually as designers. They describe how everyone visually perceives objects. This article is part of a new series about design principles that can serve both as a refresher for seasoned designers and reference for newcomers to the industry. Hopefully, the content covered here isn’t too obvious and self-explanatory, but it’s always great to have a nice quick refresher every now and again, isn’t it?
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The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of Paul Boag’s Digital Adaptation book, we’ve prepared a new riddle, and this time it’s a bit different and a bit easier. Below you’ll find three animated GIFs that contain a hidden message. Once you’ve resolved the mystery, please tweet the full sentence @smashingmag using the hashtag #smashing.
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Below you’ll find three animated GIFs that contain a hidden message. Each GIF contains a few scattered letters (all uppercase) that you can use to build words.
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Being a good designer or developer is about so much more than knowing how to use tools. It’s also about the way you approach what you do and your attitude towards it. In this article, Andrew Clarke is going to talk about four lessons that can help you do what you do better. These have been important to him. They’re lessons that he learned a long time ago, at art school.
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In this article, Olawale Oladunni will share how he used Adobe Fireworks in his iterative visual design process, along with other useful tips. As he explored all of the alternative ways to make one’s workflow efficient, he realized that Fireworks is still powerful and will continue to be the best option until Adobe unveils its replacement or until another competitor supports all of its features, including integration with other Adobe products, as Fireworks currently provides.
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People recommend various tips on optimizing WordPress’ performance. All of them are effective ways, however, be careful when implementing any of these techniques. In this article, Hristo Pandjarov will cover some of the most common issues with various speed boosters that he has encountered and share solutions to help you fix those problems or find ways around them.
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With time, Arabic calligraphy began to be used in architecture, decoration and coin design, and it continues to develop both in traditional methods as well as in digital and computer-generated arts. Arabic calligraphers from around the world continue to develop their own styles and artwork based on existing scripts and their own letters and scripts. Free modern scripts contribute to the art just as much as traditional scripts have done.
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What is the ideal product page? Who are we building this mobile website for? Putting together a mobile e-commerce website is a multidisciplinary task that encompasses business management, design, development and marketing. In this article, Lawrence Howlett will walk through all of the vital steps when planning a highly converting mobile e-commerce website.
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With iOS 7’s new Dynamics API, views can be influenced by gravity, attached to each other with springs, and bounced up against boundaries and each other. We’re used to objects in games feeling real. To get this effect, game designers use a physics engine that treats the elements as bodies in a simulation and that uses Newton’s laws of motion to calculate how they move over time. In using the engine, designers specify an object’s bounciness, its density, the level of gravity, and how things are attached to each other. In iOS 7, Apple made that technology available to UIKit-based apps as well.
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