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100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers

January 6th, 2009 in Graphics | 70 Comments

Few products have generated the kind of hype that the iPhone has. Its beautiful design and large multi-touch screen are irresistible. Although its interface is beautifully designed, some of us want to put a little something extra in it to suit our style, personality and profession and to further beautify this magical masterpiece.

Here, we proudly present the 100 Beautiful iPhone wallpapers, designed by some of the finest and most creative artists around. The wallpapers are 320×480 pixels in resolution and are usable on the iPod Touch as well. In this post we cover typography, nature, retro and vintage, illustrations and artwork, Apple wallpapers, abstract, space. Other topics will be covered in next posts. All of the images are clickable and linked to their source. You can explore further artistic treasures and more wallpapers by using the links.

You might also want to take a look at the following posts:
- (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
- More (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
- Selected Wallpapers For Your Desktop
  Covers wallpapers, dev kits, Flickr pools, widescreen and HD monsters and even wallpaper-related social communities and wallpapers for gamers.
- More Creative and Beautiful Wallpapers
  Covers fresh, original and creative wallpapers.
- Selected Wallpapers: For Desktop and Web Design
  Covers Web design-related wallpapers, and has dozens of references for Mac fans.
- 35 Space and Nebula wallpapers
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Joomla Developer’s Toolbox

January 5th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 77 Comments

Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer's toolboxes for a variety of other CMS', many readers requested a collection of resources for Joomla users and developers, so here it is. Joomla grew out of the Mambo CMS and has since built a large and loyal group of users, much like the other popular open-source options. What this means for users and developers is that there is a wealth of information and resources available, and in this post we'll take a look at many of the best.

Other developer's toolboxes from Smashing Magazine:
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Stationery Icons, Soccer Icons And Atlantic WordPress Theme

January 5th, 2009 in Freebies | 55 Comments

Last year some of our readers complained about the lack of diversity in the sets we have released in 2008. We've heard you, we came up with new ideas and we decided to offer our readers a wide variety of different sets. From now on we are going to release more specific, more practical and (hopefully) more useful icon sets — not just social icons or RSS icons.

We start 2009 with a stationery icon set, a soccer icons set and a fresh Atlantic WordPress theme. Please let us know if we are on the right track.

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50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials

January 4th, 2009 in Tutorials | 48 Comments

Adobe Illustrator is the industry-standard when it comes to the creation of vector graphics. Though a very robust tool - the learning curve involved in mastering it can be high. Thankfully, there are abundant resources on the web that allows you to "learn by doing". Video tutorials (in general) enable the learner to witness - step-by-step - how a particular technique works. We often learn best by seeing how things are done and following along with the instructor (much like in a classroom environment).

In this article, we present to you 50 excellent Adobe Illustrator video tutorials. We've broken down the video tutorials into several categories that include creating objects, effects, and general tips and techniques.

So fire up Illustrator, watch a few of these videos, and hopefully you will have learned a tip or two by the end of your adventures into these Illustrator video tutorials!

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50 Incredible Stop Motion Videos

December 31st, 2008 in Inspiration | 86 Comments

Stop motion animation is one of the hottest areas of film-making today. Stop motion is an animation art through which one can spring life in inanimate things and do the unnatural. It works by shooting a single frame of an object, then moving the object slightly, and then shooting another frame. When the film runs continuously in a film projector, or other video playback system, the illusion of fluid motion is created and the objects appear to move by themselves. This is similar to the animation of cartoons, but using real objects instead of drawings.

Well, how can you make use of stop motion in web design? Some design agencies integrate stop motion in their showreels, some may use it to present a product or a service. The main advantage of the technique is that it really looks different, unusual and therefore memorable. In technical terms, stop motion consists of many forms according to techniques used to create, animate and film it - pixilation, cutout animation, time-lapse, clay animation and many more. Stop motion animation is time-consuming, repetitive process which requires patience.

Below we present over 50 amazing examples of stop motion videos, a tribute to hard work of animators, artists and creative folks.

You may be interested in the following related posts:
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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: January 2009

December 30th, 2008 in Graphics | 147 Comments

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 40 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:
- all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
- you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
So which wallpapers have we received for January 2009?

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Looking Back On 2008 With Top Web Designers

December 29th, 2008 in How-To | 65 Comments

The start of a new year is often a time of reflection on the past year, both personally and professionally, as well as a time to look forward to the year ahead. With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to do a New Year's group interview with a number of top designers and developers. We put together a big list of questions and posed two in particular to each of the participants.

We think you'll enjoy the insight this panel provides into 2008 and 2009. There's a wide variety of topics covered, including favorite resources, trend predictions, business lessons learned, upcoming events for 2009 and more. Let's take a look at a large group interview with top web designers that takes a look back on 2008 and presents some predictions for the year 2009.

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Free Icons, Photoshop Brushes and a WordPress Theme

December 29th, 2008 in Freebies | 70 Comments

We are definitely not Santa Claus, but we love to release high-quality sets and themes for free. And, of course, we do have some beautiful and unusual and (hopefully) useful presents for the upcoming New Year's Eve.

Today we are glad to release three icon sets, one Photoshop brushes set and one exclusive WordPress-theme. A couple of more presents will be released over the next days. Happy New Year, folks!

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