We are in the 21st century, and we don’t have a product that makes it easy for everyone to tell time! Clocks and timepieces are all around us — from the microwave in your kitchen to the smartphone in your back pocket — but the digital display still fails to address one basic issue: We have to look at it. Telling time, then, requires sight.
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As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers. We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. A big thank you to all the designers for their participation.
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Web fonts aren’t just font files that need to be secure and easy to implement. They affect the overall look of a website. And thanks for the thousands of fonts, but quantity is not as important as quality. A hundred knives that can’t cut a tomato won’t meet my needs when I’m making my kid a BLT. Make our lives a little easier and help us find the Web fonts we want to use!
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Today, we’re proud to feature a free Photoshop extension, BlendMe.in, that will help everyone access those font icons they need without even leaving Photoshop. Please note that this will reset all Photoshop settings to default. Enjoy!
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Daniel Pataki has been working with WordPress since the dawn of time, and he still discovers new tips and tricks. He has compiled his own list of 21 techniques that are handy, fun or best practices rarely followed. He hopes everyone finds something new in the list!
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As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction.
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The dream of a “magical” image format that will solve the responsive images problem lives on. Yoav Weiss started wondering if such an image format could be used to solve both the art direction and resolution-switching use cases. So he created a prototype to prove its feasibility. The prototype is now available, ready to be tinkered with. In this post, Yoav explains what this prototype does, what it cannot do, how it works, and its advantages and disadvantages relative to markup solutions.
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User research helps us to understand how other people live their lives, so that we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions. It helps us to avoid our own biases, because we frequently have to create design solutions for people who aren’t like us. In this article, David Sherwin will share a process he uses at Frog to plan and conduct user research. It’s called the “research learning spiral.”
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In the previous article on Smashing Magazine, we discussed seven excellent extensions that could fundamentally change your Web design workflow in Adobe Fireworks. Ashish Bogawat would like to add to the list six more extensions. These are extensions that he always installs whenever he sets up Adobe Fireworks for himself or anyone on his team and that have proven to be big time-savers over the period that I’ve been using them.
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When Vitaly Friedman started developing websites, he was lucky to have hundreds of valuable articles that would help him become better at what he did. But ears have passed and blogs have emerged. As the time was progressing, every now and again he kept revisiting his bookmarks just to realize that all this fantastic, valuable content was slowly fading away from him.
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