September 2009
34 posts
Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone →
Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable…
Beautiful Examples of Kinetic Photography →
When you hear the word ‘kinetic‘ for the first time, probably the first thing that comes to your mind is motion. Kinetic Photography, also known as…
10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines →
Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app,…
Back-to-School With 40 Excellent Adobe Illustrator... →
Learning is a process which continues throughout the life of an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator. Along the way, designers find the task of…
Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process →
“ Just like with any other UX research or design tool, context plays a critical role in determining how effective prototyping will be for you. ”
Prototyping is a big deal right now. We get…
Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective,... →
Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your…
Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision →
Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the…
Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the... →
Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and…
Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User... →
Though many computer applications and operating systems make use of real-world metaphors like the desktop, most software interface design has little to…
Guide to CSS Font Stacks: Techniques and Resources →
CSS Font stacks are one of those things that elude a lot of designers. Many stick to the basic stacks Dreamweaver auto-recommends or go even more basic…
Showcase of Case Studies in Design Portfolios →
Portfolio websites are critical for designers who want to get exposure for their work and attract new clients. While all portfolio sites will showcase the…
Graffiti Art Tutorial in Photoshop and Illustrator →
Photoshop and Illustrator, as we’ve all come to realize, have revolutionized contemporary design and illustration, unleashing the creative potential of…
Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and... →
Smashing Magazine has been on Twitter for about a year now (@smashingmag), and it turned out to be a great medium to communicate with our audience, build…
Portfolio Design Study: Design Patterns and... →
In our recent study on Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices, we asked our readers about case studies they would like us to conduct. One of the…
How To Find Time For… Everything! →
Time management is one of the most important skills a freelance worker can learn. With a good time management system you can easily find the time to do the…
Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets →
The most important aspect of designing an individual icon is that it has to be instantly recognizable, you have to know its function, and you need to know…
The Z-Index CSS Property: A Comprehensive Look →
Most CSS properties are quite simple to deal with. Often, applying a CSS property to an element in your markup will have instant results — as soon as you…
How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress →
Facebook is one of those Web phenomena that impress everyone with numbers. To cite some: about 250 million users are on Facebook, and together they spend more…
Showcase Of Music Night Clubs Web Designs →
The time has come for the first showcase of music night club websites here on Smashing Magazine. We’ve scanned the Web up and down to find the most original and…
Data Visualization and Infographics Resources →
Data visualizations and infographics can make complex datasets easier to understand and comprehend. By creating a graphical represenatation of data and statistics,…
CSS Wishlist: New Ideas, Debates and Solutions →
The future of CSS is arriving fast, and many tools, languages, and solutions have been developed that make CSS a job not just for Web designers but developers, too….
Beautiful Black and White Photography →
Today, in the era of digital technology black and white are often awake nostalgic feelings of the 20th century, the good old times when the television was just…
50 Clever Tutorials and Techniques on Traditional... →
Traditional drawing is certainly way harder than digital and it is true that people are able to progress much faster digitally, but one should learn the…
How To Be A Samurai Designer →
In this article we’ll take a look at designing websites from a quite different perspective. We’ll discuss some pearls of samurai wisdom from the book “Hagakure” by…
Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and... →
The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design. It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to…
Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops →
E-Commerce websites are often thought of as typically being unattractive or poorly designed. In this post we will feature 35 appealing designs of online shops….
Professional Team Management Tips For Creative... →
Management is a vast subject, with several sub-categories, such as product, team management and project management. While all are interesting topics, this article…
Smashing Goes Down On September 2nd: What... →
September 2nd was a sad day for Smashing Magazine. Late in the evening, we received an email from one of our readers, reporting that the data on our Web server may…
Backgrounds In CSS: Everything You Need To Know →
Backgrounds are a core part of CSS. They are one of the fundamentals that you simply need to know. In this article, we will cover the basics of using CSS…
TV Show Web Designs: Trends and Examples →
Looking at websites from major industries that involve various forms of media can be interesting practice. In the past we have showcased websites from movies and…
35 Excellent Wireframing Resources →
Wireframing is one of the most valuable parts of any web design project. It can save a designer tons of time by hashing out the details of a site’s architecture,…
Get Ready for HTML 5 →
Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to…
Inline Validation in Web Forms →
Web forms don’t have to be irritating, and your inline validation choices don’t have to be based on wild guesses. In his examination of inline form validation options, Luke Wroblewski offers that…
A Wiser Interaction →
iTunes Download Del.icio.us Boxes and Arrows theme music generously provided by Bumper Tunes Chris Baum speaks with Bill…