December 12, 2009 — Land of tequila and mariachi, home of Chichén Itza (one of the new seven wonders of the world), amazing beaches, cheerful people, beautiful women… and last but not least, inspirational and creative Web designs for the entire world. Ours is a great country, with more than 110 million inhabitants, over 30% of which to date are connected to the Web. Read more…

December 12, 2009 — Today, we have an awesome icon set to giveaway to our readers. The icon set is called Gloss’d. The set comes with five, high-quality, ready to download icons for you to use in your next project. By the way, the set includes the best looking Twitter icon I have ever seen. Go ahead and grab the free stuff before others start downloading it and they crash our servers, thereby preventing you from downloading anything. :) Read more…

December 11, 2009 —

“The true method of knowledge is experiment.” - William Blake I spend a fair amount of time working on web design. After a full day at the office, it’s not uncommon for me to come home and work on my own site, blog or other personal projects. It’s also not uncommon for people to ask me how I “find the time” to do this type of personal work. My response, especially to other Web designers, is this. How can you not find the time to do this type of work?

December 11, 2009 — In an online world now dominated by CSS layouts, CSS-styled HTML lists have become invaluable tools in a CSS developer’s toolbox, due to the HTML lists versatile and graphically flexible nature. All this despite some of the obvious browser inconsistencies that can affect the styling of the different types of lists available in HTML coding. Read more…

December 10, 2009 — GIFs of spinning @s on the “Contact us” page. Common usability mistakes for the sake of visual appeal. Splash pages. Fancy search box. No whitespace. (Links checked February/11/2017) Read more…

December 10, 2009 — On the last type-inspiration post, we showcased some incredible black and white typography. We’ve also gathered the ultimate collection of nature-inspired typography. Today, we will be showcasing outer space typography. This is probably my favorite style of design. There is so much that you can do with the outer space, galaxy style. While it is not really appropriate to use in most client projects, it is a very fun effect to implement on your own personal projects. Read more…

December 9, 2009 — We have showcased different media of art and the different routes that you can take to express your creativity. We covered vexel artworks, graffiti, light paintings, handcraft, Moleskine art and many more. Now, to provide you with some fresh perspective, we decided to showcase a list of some inpisiring watercolor artworks. We believe that watercolor art is a very powerful way to express your feelings — in particular, watercolor can be effectively used to represent the artistic vision on a piece of paper. Read more…

December 8, 2009 — Christmas is coming and, of course, it’s just the right time to provide you with some nice freebies to fresh up your designs. To celebrate the holidays, our friends from IconEden designed “Smashing Christmas”, a free icon set, dedicated to the design community and released especially for Smashing Magazine’s readers. The set contains 39 beautiful, well-crafted icons with warm and welcoming color scheme. Read more…

December 8, 2009 — While product findability is a key factor of success in e-commerce, it is predominantly enabled by simple search alone. And while simple search usually doesn’t fulfill complex needs among users, website developers and owners still regard advanced search as just another boring to-do item during development. Owners won’t go so far as to leave it out, because every e-commerce website has some kind of advanced search functionality, but they probably do not believe it brings in much revenue. Read more…

December 8, 2009 — Ask the Expert is a weekly series here on Design Informer. For this week’s theme, we will be talking about typography. Brian Hoff is this week’s expert. Brian is a graphic designer from the always-sunny Philadelphia. He collaborates mostly on corporate identity and branding, but is also experienced in building all kinds of quality, strategic design, both in print and on the web. In addition to his design services, he also writes for the popular graphic design and creative business blog, The Design Cubicle. The blog not only teaches, inspires and helps other designers, but also focuses on client education and design awareness, while showcasing his work, creative processes, and personal practices. Read more…