As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for January 2015. You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
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Web designers usually lose money on a project as a result of the client endlessly iterating on the design. After a few bad experiences, we avoid consulting with them. Unfortunately, this often makes interaction with the client even worse, so they interfere even more, creating a vicious cycle. But there is a way that enables you to produce outstanding design and maintain your profit margin! The answer lies in involving the client in the process, rather than excluding them. It involves collaborating with the client to produce a design. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how.
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Today, we’re honored to present to you a set of flat icons designed by Freepik. This set is completely free to use for commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. Please provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word. Note that this set is licensed under Creative Commons. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons.
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One could easily argue that nothing affects a design more than typography. And good typography starts with choosing an appropriate typeface. But can having too much choice be a bad thing? In this article, Jeremiah Shoaf reviews a collection of beautiful websites and analyzes the impact that their designers’ typeface choices have had on the overall designs. She’ll critique both the good and the bad. Of course, type is subjective, so take any critiques with a grain of salt. Let’s dig in!
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Throughout his 70-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright developed a number of principles and ideals that can inspire us to design digital experiences that better stand the test of time. His views on materials, form, function, space and environment define his iconic works. These ideals and principles are still used in architecture today, and his buildings have stood the test of time, remaining relevant even in today’s digital age. In this article, Kent Eisenhuth will cover six main aspects of Wright’s approach that you can apply to digital design. His effort to create a “new” architecture can inspire us to rethink the way we approach our digital design work and even push the medium into new and exciting territories.
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Today’s icon set is designed by the folks behind Iconshock and Designshock, and consists of 100 individual icons merging outlined as well as flat styles, all vectors built in Photoshop, in four transparent PNG image sizes and available in two color versions: a limited cold palette and a warm colorful one. Please always provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word. Note that this icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons!
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Chartist was developed for a very particular need: to create simple responsive charts. While other charting libraries do a great job of visualizing data, something is always missing to satisfy this simple yet demanding need. In this article, Gion Kunz will show you how to use Chartist to create your own beautiful responsive charts. You’ll learn some key concepts of Chartist, how to easily extend it and also some advanced features, like responsive configuration overrides and the animation API.
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Creating a new cross-platform native and web applications seamlessly on an entire back end for your mobile applications that is feature-complete in data synchronization, push-notification support, user management and file-handling before you even started building the mobile experience is exactly what providers of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) are aiming to give app developers. It is up to you to determine whether that is true for the experiences you are creating.
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Visual direction is the perceived direction of forces acting on and exerted by elements. A visually heavy element will attract the eye to it. The direction is a cue to the viewer’s eye to move elsewhere. We refer to this force as visual weight and to the perceived direction of visual forces as visual direction. Both are important concepts to understand if you want to create hierarchy, flow, rhythm and balance in your composition. Many intrinsic characteristics can be modified to make an element visually weightier or lighter.
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In this tutorial, Collins Agbonghama will talk about ROT13 encryption and how it works. You’ll see how text can be programmatically encoded in ROT13 using PHP. Finally, you’ll code a WordPress plugin that scans a post for blacklisted words and replaces any in ROT13 encryption. Even if you don’t end up using the plugin, the concepts you’ll learn in creating it can be applied to many situations, such as obfuscating or encrypting inappropriate words (such as profanities) in ROT13, which would be a nice feature in a forum where people have the freedom to post anything.
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