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On-Stage: Free Vector PSD Icon Set

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place. In fact, the results are quite often pretty impressive. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release a icON Stage icon set. The set contains 49 free vector icons including PSD which can be useful for both corporate and personal setting. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in the .png-format in the resolution 128×128px. 100% pure shape-based layered PSDs are also included in the package. This icon set was designed by Deziner Folio especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

Many e-commerce sites these days tend to be loaded down with too much information on their landing pages. The reasoning for cluttered e-commerce sites is simple: the more information you can cram on the page, the more the user will buy. Unfortunately, web buyers are a finicky bunch.

Jacob Nielson reports that web users are becoming much more impatient while shopping and browsing online. Instead of spending their time going to a site’s homepage and finding the content by categories or other product recommendations, most shopping is done by quick Google searches. If the user can’t find what she’s looking for right away, she’s gone.

It’s crucial to have simple web designs to allow the user to quickly find the information they need, especially if you are selling a product. If the page is cluttered with useless text, widgets or unrelated products, the site becomes meaningless.

However, it’s become a common practice to do just the opposite. e-commerce sites have taken this “scatter shot” approach of trying to slap the potential buyer with as many options as possible. Instead of making the landing page solely about one product, sites usually clutter the page with unnecessary information, ads and related products.

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30 Free High Quality Wordpress Themes

Free professional WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present over 30 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects. Please read license disclaimers carefully before using the theme in commercial projects — they can change from time to time.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

• 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
  Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects.
• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
• 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.

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How-To: Fit a Circle In a Square Hole

Being a designer in an environment where most people adhere to a strict path of logic can be challenging. There are few logic-centric people who understand the value design has to a product or service. Instead of beating your head against your desk, do something to get the company on common ground.

Think back to the first time you discovered that not everyone holds the same respect for design as a necessary part of business as you do. You were just making your grand entrance into the professional world and, much like a child discovering their own hands and feet, you were overzealous about the impact design has on every aspect of society and business. Then something happened—a conversation with a supervisor or colleague, or a meeting with a client—that took the wind out of your sails and revealed the biggest challenge any designer can face: convincing the world of your work’s validity.

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45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos

Photos taken with a camera do not represent a single moment of time. Due to technological constraints these shots stand for some scene over a brief period of time. This time frame depends on the camera’s shutter speed. In motion blur, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion.

Motion blur is frequently used to show a sense of speed. You can artificially achieve this effect in a usual scene using cameras with a slow shutter speed. Also Adobe Photoshop can be used for this purpose, though sometimes images may look unnatural and unprofessional. You may want to takea look at resources provided in the end of the article — they show how one can add the motion blur effect in photos.

This article presents 50 beautiful examples of motion blur in photography. This showcase isn’t supposed to be the ultimate and complete selection of motion blur images — it is supposed to provide you with some inspiration of what can be done with motion blur. All pictures are linked to the author’s pages. You may want to explore further works of the photographers we’ve featured below.

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The <hr /> Contest

What is <hr />? Basically, it is an old HTML-tag which has been used since the very beginning of the Web. hr stands for the horizontal rule and represents exactly what you would expect — a horizontal line or a horizontal divider.

By default, web browsers render hr as a simple horizontal line. In terms of semantics the tag is supposed to clearly separate content blocks. This is often used in design of footers, but also makes sense in other situations — for instance, if you want to separate two blog posts or make the divisions within the content structure sharper.

Similar to our blog header contest we’d like to create a smashing gallery of freely available <hr /> graphics. The winner will get a Wacom Intuos3 9X12 USB Tablet.

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Game Sites Design Survey: Examples and Current Practices

Game websites are a little bit of a mystery. You won’t find them in the popular CSS-showcases since they are seldom fully CSS-based; however, they also rarely show up in sites that collect best Flash sites. The FWA, for example, has added only a few game sites this year. This is odd, because there are usually roughly hundred quality titles released each month, each with their own website.

During the research I’ve found out that there are a lot of creative game designs. This makes it extra strange that amongst all the showcases and studies we see on blogs and in magazines there is rarely one focused on game industry. High time we take a depth look into this area of web-design.

This article is the first of a two-part-series where Smashing Magazine takes a critical look at web design in the video game industry. The first part is an in-depth review of the game-related sites out there. What design elements keep returning? What factors influence these design elements? Are the sites mainly CSS- or Flash-based? The article ends with a showcase of some beautiful examples of game site designs.

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Notepad Chaos: A Free Wordpress Theme

Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free Wordpress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.

Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Today we are glad to release Notepad Chaos — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 2 columns, a quite vibrant design including “personal” design elements such as handwritten headings, stick-it-notes, clips and pins. The theme was designed by Evan Eckard especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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