January 2009
41 posts
404 Error Pages, One More Time →
The design of 404 error pages is often overlooked and underestimated. However, designed carefully, these pages can make a random visitor stay on your website, take a look around and eventually…
Making it Big by Working For Yourself →
Do you work for yourself?
You may think you do. As a blogger, you have your own schedules, you write when you feel like it, you write about things you love and so on.
But that’s not what I…
Colors In Corporate Branding And Design →
Color is a major consideration in any Web design. Whether for an individual, small company, or major corporation, color scheme is one of the most significant factors in the overall look and…
Vintage and Blues WordPress Themes →
In this post we release 2 free high-quality WordPress magazine-themes. The themes include full PSD-templates and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. The themes were commissioned by…
50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web... →
By Noura Yehia and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team
Typography is elegant when it is attractive and communicates the designer’s ideas. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very…
Pattern Languages for Interaction Design →
Will Evans stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, styleguides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are…
10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress →
By Sergej Müller and Alex Frison
The administration area of a Web application is a favorite target of hackers and thus particularly well protected. The same goes for WordPress: when creating a…
8 Inspiring Stories Of ASCII Art →
Labels are fragile: text and pictures have always been closely connected. From the dawn of written language to the era of microcomputers, much of human creation has explored the relationship…
35 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates →
For website owners who are evaluating e-commerce solutions, there are several good options for powering websites and shopping carts. Regardless of which option you chose, deciding on a design…
Friday Freebies: Flavours Icon Set and Cute... →
We continue to deliver fresh high-quality freebies to our readers and we continue to pursue the diversity of subjects that we are going to cover on Smashing Magazine. From the beginning of the…
Win a Free Copy of Spotlight WordPress Themes →
It’s hardly been over a week since I launched Spotlight WordPress Theme and I’ve already received plenty of positive feedback from everyone who saw and used the theme (which also means the…
Ask SM: How To Create A Colorful Sitemap With... →
We like to experiment with new ideas and concepts. We like to challenge ourselves and provide our readers with new formats. This post is the first in our “Ask Smashing Magazine” series, in which…
All It's Cracked Up To Be →
When the Web first emerged, there was a hole in the user experience world. Many people were practicing interaction design, but their community was shoe-horned into those of other disciplines like…
Researching Video Games the UX Way →
Video games are often overlooked in the scope of usability testing simply because, in a broad sense, their raison d’etre is so different than that of a typical functional interface: fun, engagement,…
More Web Design Trends For 2009 →
Last week we presented 10 Web Design Trends For 2009, our review of the most promising developments and techniques in web design that may become big in 2009. In the first part we covered…
Win a Free Copy of Spotlight WordPress Themes →
It’s hardly been over a week since I launched Spotlight WordPress Theme and I’ve already received plenty of positive feedback from everyone who saw and used the theme (which also means the…
50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools →
By Jacob Gube
PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like…
Brighter Horizons for Web Education →
No industry can sustain itself if it doesn’t master the art of cultivating new talent—an art that requires close ties between practitioners and educators. Yet web design education consists mainly of…
Elevate Web Design at the University Level →
Web education is out of date and fragmented. There are good people working hard to change this, but because of the structure of higher education, it will take time. As part of a year-long journey to…
12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface... →
By Dmitry Fadeyev and Smashing Magazine Editorial
Last week, we presented 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques, the first part of our review of useful design trends in modern Web…
The Beauty Of Urban Decay →
By Robert Bowen and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team
The city is a fantastic source of beauty and inspiration, with all the glitz and glamour glistening beneath the city lights. But there is…
The Ultimate Collection Of Free Vector Packs →
By Steven Snell
Designers love freebies that make life easier and help them create higher-quality work. Free vectors are useful, free vector packs even more so. Fortunately, there are plenty of…
Smashing Magazine Comic Strip: Episode 1 →
A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Cartoons and Comic Strip Art and, to be honest, there was a good reason why we took some time to research on this topic. The truth is that we are pretty tired…
45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience →
by Noura Yehia
JavaScipt libraries have made huge leaps and bounds in helping developers write code and develop products more quickly. jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks,…
Web Design Trends For 2009 →
We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go…
Mobile Web Design Trends For 2009 →
Web designers know that the industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of skills is required in order to stay up to date. In the past few years, one of the biggest…
Spotlight just for $30 now! →
In a fit of generosity, I just decided to reduce the price of Spotlight WordPress Theme from previous $59 to $30. That’s almost half of the original price.
What do I achieve by cutting the …
10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques →
More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. Web application…
Tools Icons, Horror Icons and Twitter Icons →
We continue to deliver fresh high-quality freebies to our readers and we continue to pursue the diversity of subjects that we are going to cover on Smashing Magazine. From the beginning of the…
Introducing Spotlight: A Powerful WordPress Theme →
You heard me right folks! I’ve partnered with my friend Haris and have launched a new site dedicated to premium WordPress Themes over at Theme Sphere.
And the first theme is a very…
40 Incredible Near-Infrared Photos →
One of the most charming contrasting color effects you can get in photography is by using infrared. An easy way to understand near-infrared light is to think of it as the color of the rainbow…
Introducing Tweetbacks Plugin for Wordpress →
Just yesterday we introduced Twitter Avatars In Comments plugin for Wordpress that enables bloggers to have both Twitter and Gravatar avatars in blog comments. We are certainly not going to turn…
Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3 →
By Chris Spooner
There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design. These features include CSS styling rules…
Twitter Avatars In Comments Wordpress Plugin →
Over the last months Twitter has become extremely popular across the Web, with more blogs, magazines and companies using it to communicate with their audience and their customers. Even we started…
Textures In Modern Web Design →
If you look around at well-designed websites in CSS galleries or any other source of design inspiration, you’ll see that texture is extremely common in modern Web design. One of the reasons it’s…
10 Killer WordPress Hacks →
by Jean-Baptiste Jung
2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated…
100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers →
Few products have generated the kind of hype that the iPhone has. Its beautiful design and large multi-touch screen are irresistible. Although its interface is beautifully designed, some of us…
Joomla Developer’s Toolbox →
By Steven Snell
Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer’s toolboxes for a variety…
Stationery Icons, Soccer Icons and Atlantic... →
Last year some of our readers complained about the lack of diversity in the sets we have released in 2008. We’ve heard you, we came up with new ideas and we decided to offer our readers a wide…
50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials →
Adobe Illustrator is the industry-standard when it comes to the creation of vector graphics. Though a very robust tool - the learning curve involved in mastering it can be high. Thankfully, there…
Web Trend Map 4: Preview →
While the first map was hacked together in an afternoon, the second took a week, and the third devoured a month of concentrated work, the fourth Web Trend Map (due in February) has already taken…