It used to be enough for user interface elements to “look professional” or simply to “add polish” to a website. But in the past few years we’ve come to expect more personal interactions and stronger relationships with the apps we use. Our relationship with the web has evolved dramatically over the past few years. It is a much more intimate relationship than it was before we had smartphones and tablets. Physically, the web is in our pockets. It’s on the couch. Custom images are a powerful design tool. They can tell a story and convey a distinct personality. Custom illustrations can be especially impactful. They can make our audience feel personally connected to an app or website, while being an integral part of the design.
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Time to freshen up your desktop! Our monthly wallpapers challenge is an opportunity to let your ideas run wild and try something new, to indulge in a little project just for fun. This post features desktop wallpapers for May 2017, created by designers and artists from all across the globe. Each wallpaper comes in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
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Sketch makes the day-to-day life of a user interface designer a lot better. Mundane little things such as measuring distances and sizes are now much easier and quicker. You can automate parts of your workflow and use real data in your Sketch designs. You can also organize your files more optimally, and more. If you’re a UI designer and are still using mostly Photoshop or Illustrator, Lachezar Petkov highly recommends you try Sketch. You might never want to look back!
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Javier Cuello started using Sketch a few years ago, as a replacement for his favorite design software back then, Fireworks, which had been discontinued by Adobe — leaving a whole generation of designers broken-hearted. In this article, Javier will outline how to make use of symbols in Sketch in order to unleash their full potential, going from the most basic situations to some more advanced use cases. He’ll also include some tips and tricks that he has learned along the way.
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We’ve been on this mission to bring you unique wallpaper calendars each month anew for eight years already, and we are very thankful to all the designers and artists who keep it running by diligently contributing their artworks to it. This post features their works for April 2017. No matter if April means blooming colors and embracing the warmer weather in your part of the world or getting cozy for autumn, our new batch of desktop wallpapers is bound to cater for some fresh inspiration regardless of that.
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Due to its similarity to Sketch, Figma was easy for Chrstian Krammer to grasp right from the start, but it also has some unique features to differentiate it from its competitor, such as easy file-sharing, vector networks, “constraints” (for responsive design) and real-time collaboration. In this article, Chrstian would like to compare both apps in detail and highlight where each of them shines.
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If you need a little inspiration kick to get your creative juices flowing, Cosima Mileke has something for you that could work: desktop wallpapers. Each month, artists and designers from across the globe diligently contribute their works to it. And well, it wasn’t any different this time around. This post features their artwork for March 2017. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar. All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper. Time to freshen up your desktop!
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Data should be the cornerstone of everything you create. It makes it easier to account for edge cases, or things you might not have thought of otherwise. The easiest way to work with real data in Sketch is the with Craft plugin from InVision. It provides a wealth of predefined content, such as names and addresses, lets you scour a website for the required information, and enables you to feed in a JSON file and work with the provided data.
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In this post, Cosima Mielke has hand-picked 30 fonts that are bound to give your project the finishing touch, and maybe even inspire you to something entirely new. The fonts can all be downloaded for free. However, please note that some of them are free for personal use only and are clearly marked as such in the description. When working on a project yourself, freebies like these can come to the rescue when you have to get along on a tight budget, but, more often that that, they simply are the missing piece that’ll make your design complete.
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In this article, Christian Krammer will teach how easy it is to recreate real-world objects in a very accurate way. You will learn not only how to stack multiple borders, but also how to apply gradients to create distinctive effects. You’ll also learned more about rotations and how to use the Rotate Copies function to add multiple copies of the same object in a very special way. To help you along the way you can also download the Sketch editable file.
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