March 27, 2009 — Over the last months we focused on releases of icons and themes, so we thought that it may be useful to release Photoshop brushes and vector graphics for a change. Hence, in this post we release a set of Photoshop brushes for space effects, a set of brushes to simulate the effect of a painted canvas, a hand-drawn vector illustration set and a Moleskine icon set. You can use the sets (except the bonus set) for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. Read more…

March 27, 2009 — Last week we published Getting Started With Ruby On Rails, the first part of our Ruby On Rails introduction. We explained basic ideas behind Ruby and presented concepts and essential components of the language. Read more…

March 25, 2009 — For years, Apple has had a huge impact on designers and graphic artists across the globe. The simplicity and sharpness of the Aqua interface in Mac OS X strongly influenced the way new products were being presented and designed. Read more…

March 25, 2009 — The most popular and best open source database is MySQL. Simple as that. It is consistently fast , reliabile and very, very easy to use. One of MySQLs main features is its cross-platform support, it will run on almost all operating systems, including Windows, OSX, Linux and many more. So, MySQL is the best database, and we all use it. The question now is which is the best MySQL Admin and Development Tool. Read more…

March 25, 2009 — In this article, we take a closer look at the nature of drop-down navigation menus and analyze situations in which they should or should not be used. Read more…

March 24, 2009 — Here, on the Smashing Editorial team, we always try to meet the expectations of our readers. We do our best to avoid misunderstandings, and we try to spread knowedge and present only the best design practices and development techniques. However, sometimes we do make mistakes. And when we do, we apologize and do our best to correct what we’ve done. In November 2008 we published the article 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming. Apparently, according to negative comments to the post, it contained some errors and some statements that are just wrong. We sincerely apologize for our mistake, and we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we caused by it. However, this simple apology is not good enough. To solve the problem, we asked Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates, two PHP gurus, to take a closer look at the article, explain its errors and make it perfectly clear what is actually right and wrong in the theory and practice. This article is a professional response to our article published a couple of months ago. Read more…

March 23, 2009 — When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge. Read more…

March 23, 2009 — Inspiration is all around us: you can derive new ideas from people you meet, places you visit and observations you make. Sometimes it is enough just to take a look around and observe the beauty of nature surrounding us everywhere. For instance, spring is often considered the most beautiful and inspirational period of the year, with its refreshing, colorful, vivid imagery and structures. And this post hopes to prove just that. In Web design, you can explore various facets of spring: the flourishing beauty of the environment; the time of passion, emotions and love; the time of warmth and the refreshing evening breeze; but also rainy storms and muddy ground. Below, we present a showcase of 35 outstanding pictures related to spring. Hopefully, these will give you a new perspective and maybe provide some ideas for your next design. Please notice: every image is linked to the source from where it was taken. Feel free to explore further works of the talented photographers and artists presented here. You may also want to take a look at the following related posts: * The Beauty Of Urban Decay * Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography Read more…

March 23, 2009 —

This is our fourth installment of Ask SM, featuring reader questions about Web design, focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this post we’ll cover how you can distribute the horizontal space between elements evenly, how you can achieve maximum sides on images; you’ll also learn best practices for CSS font replacement and answers to a couple of quickfire questions.

Antoine Nicolas writes: *Do you know how to perfectly and dynamically distribute objects horizontally in a container using CSS?* This is a classic example of something that is fairly difficult to do in CSS but probably shouldn’t be. I have approached this problem in a number of different ways in the past. I have revisited it a little now, and I’ll present what I believe is the best solution here.

March 20, 2009 — Art is a thing that attracts almost every individual. Today we would like to share with you two different but very interesting mediums of art which are called as Surreal and Dark Art. These types of art are quite different from other conventional mediums of art. In these medium, artist conveys his thought and imagination in a very mysterious but somewhat fantastic or I should say in a bizarre style. Read more…