When it comes to beauty nothing can beat the beauty of nature. Although we, designers, can derive inspiration from almost everything, nature often manages to provide us with beautiful eye-catching perspectives we would never have explored otherwise. We have collected hundreds of wallpapers already (see links below). In this post we would like to focus on wallpapers which emphasize the variety and beauty of nature.
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Textures and patterns are used more often than one may think. The reason why we don’t see them is because they usually remain in the background, supporting the overall design, replacing a standard background color and creating a more inviting atmosphere. But they almost never stand out. Used primarily for background images, they need to fit to the overall design making the content easier to perceive. In fact, wood textures seem to have become so popular that designers suggest that wood is the new glossy style and wood is the new white.
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Last week we have presented first findings of our web forms survey. The main objective of the survey was to provide designers and developers with some intuition of how effective web forms are designed; we also presented some guidelines of how an effective and user-friendly web form can be achieved.
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Table of contents is often considered to be one of the most unspectacular design elements ever invented. Because of its simple, usual form, table of contents is often not given the attention it may deserve — after all, it is just a list of the parts of a book or document organized in the order in which the parts appear. But why not use exactly that and surprise the reader of a booklet, brochure, annual report or a book with some beautiful and original table of contents? In fact, many creative approaches are possible. And this post attempts to prove exactly that.
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If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe to them how the service works, explain to them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they’ll get in return. And, of course, we should also make it extremely easy for them to participate.
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We love free icons and icon sets. In the overview below we present 55 more excellent, free and professional icons for desktop and web design. Some of them can be used for both private and commercial projects. You may always use them for free in your private projects. Nevertheless, it is always worth to take a look at the license agreements — they can change from time to time.
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No, they shouldn’t. At first glance the decision to open links in new windows or not depends on the given site and the preferences of its visitors.
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The new generation of web browsers — Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Internet Explorer 7 — provides a feature which seems to save a lot of work for web-developers in the future, namely the Full Page Zoom. Instead of allowing users to increase and decrease the font size on a given web-site, browsers now enable users to literally scale the rendered layout including visuals and background images. Consequently, every fixed, pixel-based layout becomes “scalable”; the content area always remains within the layout box it is supposed to be in and there is no chance of producing overlapping boxes as we’ve seen in previous generations of web-browsers.
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How many creative solutions for calendar design are out there? If you take a look around you’ll find out that most calendars are designed in a “standard” linear fashion. Calendar cards usually have the same structure: the month is designed in bold while the days are placed below within a rigid grid structure. Well, it doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, there are a number of creative approaches one can consider when designing calendars.
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When it comes to web design too often perfect, colorful and boxy designs make the cut; however, the reality is different as it is hard to find objects with a perfect shape and a perfect color in our daily routine. To achieve a unique and communicative design we need to consider more creative approaches. For instance, we can draw sites by ourselves — or at least some parts of it.
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