The ever burgeoning web design community has received numerous plaudits for its incessant dedication towards collaborative information sharing. Tutorials, CSS website showcases and open source web development projects are some of the many treats available to the knowledge-seeking design enthusiast. Social media networks too have been thoroughly utilised in promoting the vast amount of material available for designers, amongst other like-minded visual arts aficionados. But what is there in store for the ‘reader’? – The normal thumb-twiddling average Joe who has a keen appreciation of visual aesthetics but is first and foremost a reader.
Read more…
Seeing as we are all human (well, presumably whoever is reading this post anyway), we should recognize that mistakes happen. They even have that saying, “To err is human…,” which goes to show that it is not only commonplace for us to err once or twice: it is expected. But a method is behind this madness, because making mistakes is one of the major ways we learn. This is no different for freelancers.
Read more…
How would you like to design a beautiful, colorful, stimulating website that is captivating, memorable, and allows you to let your creative juices flow without the need to worry too much about usability and best practices? In today’s web design market, it’s rare that such a project would present itself — unless you were asked to design a website for children.
Read more…
There are many templates out there for contracts that freelancers can adopt but eventually, you may have to create one for a specific unorthodox project or maybe you just want to take the time to devise your own template. In this article, you will find what could be considered the bare bones that every contract should address.
Read more…
Photoshop is a magical tool for digital artists and photographers, and it rules the digital imaging world. It is not just a tool, though; Photoshop is a blank canvas that invites you to perform magic with your creativity. It gives you room to creatively manipulate photos and explore the artist in yourself.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…