Back in July, Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers presented 8 basic techniques for adding popular features to the front end of a WordPress-powered website. The premise was that WordPress has become an elegant, lightweight content management solution that offers the fundamentals out of the box, atop a modular core that offers incredible potential in the hands of a capable developer.
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Today designing a unique, compelling portfolio has become a crucial task for designers, studios, companies and everyone whose business is on the Web. Not only does it help one stand out among the numerous competitors, but it is also a great tool for self-expression and demonstration of skills.
Now designers face new challenges in attracting the capricious web audience – a plain web page with a project list on it is out of date and boring, while fancy Flash websites with intricate navigation are annoying. Fortunately, despite all difficulties beautiful and artistic designs are appearing in an endless stream. Designers skillfully use all the benefits of the digital age and create websites that are rich in effects and eye-popping yet simple and accessible.
In this post you can see a collection of 69 new, ingenious and beautiful portfolio designs that will hopefully become a decent inspiration source for you. The collection includes both Flash and HTML websites, however all the designs are stuck to the balance of visual attractiveness and usability. Notice that every screenshot is clickable and leads to the website itself.
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Let’s look at some clever techniques developed and used by top professionals in the Web design industry. We can use their examples to develop our own alternative solutions.
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In this post we present a new speedy way of writing HTML code using CSS-like selector syntax — a handy set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. It was developed by our author Sergey Chikuyonok and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
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T-shirts, as you’ll surely agree, play a big part in the design world. Sometimes, we designers don’t get the kinds of projects we want, and so we are left to apply our creativity in some other way, many of us opting to submit graphics in t-shirt competitions or printing them ourselves and selling them through shopping cart systems such as BigCartel.
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Let’s face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?
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Buttons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style buttons, including to make them more attractive and to enhance usability. One of the most important reasons, though, is that standard buttons can easily be missed by users because they often look similar to elements in their operating system. Here, we present you several techniques and tutorials to help you learn how to style buttons using CSS. We’ll also address usability.
Before we explain how to style buttons, let’s clear up a common misconception: buttons are not links. The main purpose of a link is to navigate between pages and views, whereas buttons allow you to perform an action (such as submit a form).
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We control the flow of user interaction on our websites. By crafting an interface to facilitate certain behaviors, we can influence the direction in which our community goes. In this article, we’ll demonstrate the power of social interface design and what it can do for you, using several practical examples.
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Thanksgiving is one of my favorite times of the whole year. It’s a time when our families get together to have some food, fun, and fellowship. During Thanksgiving, there are some things that I try do as a graphic and web designer and I would like to share those 5 things with you.
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When laid by a learned hand, brush strokes can convey a sense of energy, tactility and humanness. These qualities speak to your audience’s subconscious, whispering ideas that words alone can’t convey. In the digital realm, a website with beautiful brushwork is a welcome break from the stark precision of most corporate websites. [Updated February/28/2017]
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