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Author Vitaly Friedman

580 articles

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX workshops. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems. He also runs Smart Interface Design Patterns, a video course and UX training for passionate UX designers.

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Vitaly Friedman wrote

T-Shaped vs. V-Shaped Designers

Job openings typically cast a very restrictive frame for candidates, with long lists of expectations and requirements. But what if this narrow focus can overlook the value of “V”-shaped designers who excel by crossing boundaries, connecting dots, and innovating beyond rigid boxes? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Now Shipping: Success At Scale, A New Smashing Book by Addy Osmani

It’s here, and it’s shipping! Meet our newest Smashing book, ”Success at Scale”. It’s filled with practical insights and real-world case studies of how big changes can be made on projects of any size. Addy Osmani has curated finest examples, case studies and interviews to help you get successful at scale. Jump to the details and get the book right away. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

What’s The Perfect Design Process?

The design process is messy. You might be following a structured approach, but too often, it takes a life of its own. And before you know it, you are designing in chaos, with last-minute changes and missed deadlines. So, what’s the “perfect” design process? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

How We Improved SmashingMag Performance

In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Writing For Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine’s primary goal is to deliver quality content for the web development and design community. If you have valuable tips, tricks, ideas or techniques to share, then you’re more than welcome to write for us and help provide others with solid articles and useful insights. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smart Interface Design Patterns In Your Pocket: Checklist Cards PDF

Meet our Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklist Cards, a deck of 100 cards with common questions to ask when tackling a common interface challenge — carousel, table, date picker, autocomplete, filtering, sorting, search, configurator, slider, timeline, map, web forms, reviews and testimonials, onboarding, pricing plan, authentication and many others. Get the PDF deck right away. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smart Interface Design Patterns In Your Pocket: Checklist Cards PDF

Meet our Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklist Cards, a deck of 100 cards with common questions to ask when tackling a common interface challenge — carousel, table, date picker, autocomplete, filtering, sorting, search, configurator, slider, timeline, map, web forms, reviews and testimonials, onboarding, pricing plan, authentication and many others. Get the PDF deck right away. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

#BlackLivesMatter

We stand firmly behind the Black Lives Matter movement. We have always stood strongly behind introducing a wide range of voices to Smashing publications and conferences. Positive change is difficult, but it’s possible. It takes work, time, and dedication. We are fully committed as a team to see it through. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Building A CSS Layout: Live Stream With Rachel Andrew

Today, Rachel Andrew spoke about how to build a CSS layout. Follow along and learn how to use Grid and Flexbox, as well as why Rachel makes certain decisions as she builds out the layout. In this session, Rachel will be building a component of a layout, talking through her thinking as she does so. Is Flexbox or Grid the right method to use? How will the component respond to different screen sizes? And, what about those old browsers? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing TV Live: Privacy UX, A Session With Vitaly Friedman

Today, we broadcasted a live session on privacy UX, highlighting privacy UX patterns and strategies to consider when designing and building privacy-aware websites and apps. As the webinars have always been about sharing lessons learned with the community, we’d like to open them up to everybody, with Members having a chance to ask questions right after the session. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Meet “Inclusive Components”, A New Printed Book By Heydon Pickering

Our products become slower, clunkier and more painful to use — often simply unbearable for keyboard- and screen reader users, and as such fragile and vulnerable for legal disputes. Let’s fix it. IToday, we bring you Heydon Pickering’s new book Inclusive Components, which explores more accessible and robust solutions for the UI patterns we author, plug in, and use every day. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

UX Improvements For Keyboard Accessibility

The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman kindly asked Aaron Pearlman, Principal UX Designer at Deque Systems, to share some practical tools and techniques to ensure that we’re all providing an inclusive and accessible experience for our users. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

JAMstack Fundamentals: What, What And How

The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. You probably have heard of JAMstack — the new web stack based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup — but what does it mean for your workflow and when does it make sense in your projects? We’ve kindly asked Phil Hawksworth to run a webinar explaining what JAMStack actually means and when it makes sense, as well as how it affects tooling and front-end architecture. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

When Do We Need A Design System? An Interview With Brad Frost

The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Demystifying JAMstack: An Interview With Phil Hawskworth

The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Phil Hawksworth, a front-end engineer who is now focusing on developing strategies for JAMstack technologies to make building for the web simpler, faster, and more secure. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Privacy UX: Privacy-Aware Design Framework

Many mobile applications require access to location, photos, and even the camera during installation, which isn’t something most customers would be happy to consent to. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman talks about privacy-related design patterns. You’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with the notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

It’s Here! Meet “Art Direction For The Web,” A New Smashing Book

The web is more than predictable compositions of rectangles, circles and triangles. With CSS Grid Layout, CSS Shapes and a bit of art direction we can achieve remarkable results — we just need a front-end strategy how to get there. That’s why we created “Art Direction for the Web,” a new Smashing Book for breaking out of generic experiences on the web. Now we can study the once uncharted territory of layout, type treatment and composition that print designers have skillfully and meticulously conquered, and explore which lessons from print we could bring to our web experiences today. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Privacy UX: Better Notifications And Permission Requests

With so many applications and services and people and machines and chatbots fighting for our attention, staying focused is a luxury that needs to be savored and protected, and so no wonder notifications don’t enjoy a decent reputation these days. More than that, often they feel off the point and manipulative, too. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman will talk about privacy-related design patterns. He’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with those notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Privacy UX: Better Cookie Consent Experiences

Now cookie prompts aren’t particularly useful, but they certainly helped raise awareness about privacy and data collection on the web. In fact, users now know that websites track their data, which they weren’t aware of a few years ago. But they often see it as a necessary evil in exchange for accessing the content “for free.” This series of articles is about privacy-related design patterns. Vitaly Friedman will be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with those notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Privacy UX: Common Concerns And Privacy In Web Forms

Web interfaces have become quite a character, haven’t they? Self-indulgent, impolite, disrespectful and obsessed with user’s data. In this series of articles, we’re looking into privacy UX patterns to make our interfaces better without leaving conversion considerations behind. In this four-part series, Vitaly Friedman will explore some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with notorious GDPR cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking, and offboarding experience. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Don’t Pay To Speak At Commercial Events

The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. But what lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

SmashingConf Toronto Videos

In this article, Vitaly Friedman brings you the videos from our Toronto Smashing Conf, which are now available! Toronto was our all live-coded conference. Take a look at what our speakers got up to without their usual slide decks. The speakers had been asked to present without slides. And it was brilliant! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

We Are Just Getting Started: 1,000 Smashing Members

Today is a very important day for us. We’re incredibly honored to have crossed our first milestone of 1,000 Smashing members today. In fact, with Membership, sometimes it feels like walking around a small town in which everyone knows each other and their friends, and so we know many members by name, and we’ve also met some of them at Smashing Conferences. In this post Vitaly Friedman highlights some of the members, how much money we’ve earned and how we spent it, and a bit of a feel about what Membership is like. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Animating SVG Files With SVGator

We’re pretty excited by tools such as SVGator, which really speed up the process when you’re making simple SVG animations. Animated SVG files have become very popular, because they are entirely scalable, small and 100% code-based, which allows for so many transformations and tweaks. This, however, comes at a price: the steep learning curve for complete beginners. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will show you how easy it is to use and how you can get a great-looking animation in no time. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Meet Smashing Book 6: New Frontiers In Web Design

Smashing Book 6 is here with everything you need to know to tackle the new adventures web design and development are bringing along. No theory, just things that worked in practice. This book is dedicated to the challenges and headaches that we are facing today, and how to resolve them. In this article, Vitaly Friedman tells you everything about it! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

New Treasures In Front-End And UX — Meet SmashingConf NYC 2018

SmashingConf is heading back to New York! SmashingConf NYC 2018 will explore how new web technologies, findings and emerging front-end/UX techniques can make us all better designers and developers. Today, Vitaly Friedman invites you to join us for two days full of front-end adventures and UX practices — highly practical techniques and strategies that you can apply to your work right away. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Future Is Here! Augmented And Virtual Reality Icon Set

Looking for an icon set that’ll take you on a journey through AR and VR technology? Augmented and virtual reality are changing the way we experience and interact with the world around us — from the way we consume media and shop to the way we communicate and learn. And today, Vitaly Friedman has got your back with these funky icons and illustrations brought to you by the Vexels team. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

A Conference Without Slides: Meet SmashingConf Toronto 2018 (June 26-27)

SmashingConf Toronto is coming! Join us for a conference without slides, and see how experienced designers and developers work live. With lots of time for deep dive-ins. June 26–27. All talks will be live coding and design sessions on stage, showing how speakers, including pattern libraries setup, design workflows and shortcuts, debugging, naming conventions, and everything in between. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Celebrating Smashing Newsletter #200: The Things We Learned Along The Way

Today is the 200th issue of our precious li’l Smashing Newsletter, and in this issue we’d love to highlight the people behind this little project — the entire team, writing and editing and proofreading and pushing that damn “Send” button. 200 newsletter issues, thoroughly researched, written and edited by the SmashingMag team. We’re celebrating today’s issue by highlighting a part of the team behind this magazine. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing A Perfect Configurator UX

How would you design a responsive car configurator? How would you deal with accessibility, navigation, real-time previews, interaction and performance? Let’s figure it out. In this article, Vitaly Friedman dives deep into the dos and don’ts of designing a perfect configurator. As designers, we might try to make our configurators advanced and sophisticated, but too often we overwhelm customers with too many non-trivial options. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Respect Always Comes First

The past years have been remarkable for web technologies. Our design process is systematic and efficient. And after so many years, accessibility and performance have finally become established, well-recognized pillars of user experience. It’s a truly wonderful time to be designing and building for the web, and Vitaly Friedman couldn’t be more excited and honored to be a part of these developments. However, as designers and developers, we focus on beautiful interfaces and fast experiences, but there is one side often missing: respect towards privacy, security, inclusivity, authenticity, personality, and ethics. It’s about time we change that. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Mystery Riddle Is Resolved: When Purple Rain Meets Felix The Cat

You know how sometimes during one of those late conference evenings somebody brings up a seemingly ridiculous topic and then the entire conversation seems to circle around it? That’s exactly what happened at SmashingConf Freiburg when suddenly the entire conversation was about how famous books and movies could be represented in an emoji, and it turned out to be a pretty decent cliffhanger for this particular Emoji Riddle. These riddles can be quite addictive and annoying, can’t they? With seven mischievous riddles published over the last few years, we’ve learned a few lessons along the way. At this point, you might be used to endless, mischievous, tricky, mean, time-consuming and intricate Mystery Riddles, and the latest one wasn’t any different. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Mystery Riddle #8, An Emoji Edition

  • 3 min read

To celebrate the relaunch of this little website, we’ve prepared something special yet again — a Smashing Emoji Mystery Riddle. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden key. The key is always exactly one emoji. Your job is to find these emoji as fast as possible. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the discovered emoji in one single tweet at @smashingmag. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

From Cats With Love: Welcome The New Smashing Membership

This article is a part of the series about how we work and design and build and play. Today is the day when everything changes. Meet Smashing Membership, a community effort dedicated to support and highlight new and old voices of the community side by side. And you can be a part of it. A safe, friendly place where together we can share, learn and decide on the future of the web. But also an effort to move away from an ad-ridden, noisy, clicks-driven web to a friendlier, cleaner and calmer place. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

“You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned” — Meet SmashingConf San Francisco #breakout (April 17-18)

With our third annual conference in San Francisco, we want to explore strategies for breaking out of the box: leaving behind generic designs and smelly code base. We’ll unlearn old habits and dig into strategies for breaking out: leaving behind the generic solutions, exploring new design workflows, understanding new performance techniques, and all the capabilities that we have at our hands already and in the near future. We’ll find out find out how we all can be more productive today and how we can make smarter decisions tomorrow. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Consultancy

Before you can start to improve things, you need to convince management that things need improving. That can be challenging! Management is not always digitally savvy and don’t grasp how significantly things have changed. Creating a case for change can be hard when you are working alone. We want to help you with that. We have years of experience writing business cases and presenting to management. Let us guide you through the process.’ Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

We’ve Got A Lil’ Announcement To Make: Rachel Andrew Is SmashingMag’s New Editor-In-Chief

It’s time for a change. Smashing Magazine has been the heart of everything we’ve been working on throughout all this time, and with many new Smashing adventures scheduled for 2018, it deserves a stronger focus and support. Today, Vitaly Friedman is more than happy and honored to welcome the one-and-only Rachel Andrew as the new editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. Rachel will be helping us bring the focus back to the core of this little Smashing universe — this very magazine that you are reading right now. With her, we are happy to have a reliable and extremely knowledgeable editor on our side, the one we could only dream of! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Uploading Directories At Once With webkitdirectory

Uploading an entire folder or folders of files is usually quite a hassle, as files in each folder have to be selected manually. And then some folders might contain sub-folders as well. You can use webkitdirectory, a non-standard attribute that allows users to pick a directory via a file input. Currently supported in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. It’s important to note that the attribute is non-standard, so it will not work for everybody. However, it doesn’t break anything as browsers that don’t support it will just ignore it, so you can easily progressively enhance your file upload without relying on the feature being supported everywhere. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

We’re Touring Through Southeast Asia: Join The Mozilla Developer Roadshow!

While many of us are quite familiar with publications and events surrounding us, we often lack the global perspective on what’s happening in the web industry across the world. What about front-end events in Kuala Lumpur? What about the acceptance of UX-driven processes in Hong Kong? That’s exactly what we want to find out! Today, Vitaly Friedman is happy to announce that we have teamed up with our friends at Mozilla for the Developer Roadshow Asia, so we can connect and learn from designers and developers in southeastern Asia. Together, we’re planning on organizing a series of informal, free meetup-style events for people who build for the web. Do join us, won’t you? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The CSS Grid Challenge: Build A Template, Win Some Smashing Prizes!

With CSS Grid being now supported in all major browsers, most of the hacks that helped to achieve complex layouts have become obsolete, and we’d love to invite you to a little contest to explore the possibilities and features of CSS Grid together. You create an interesting, accessible layout with CSS Grid, or use CSS Grid to rebuild an existing layout, and at the end of the contest, all templates and layouts will be made available to everyone for free download under the MIT license. The aim is to build a community repository full of CSS Grid goodness that inspires fellow developers and helps spread the wide adoption of CSS Grid. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing The Perfect Feature Comparison Table

When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Learn From What You See: It All Starts With Inspiration

Every designer develops their unique style and workflow, and studying their artwork can all inspire us to look beyond our own horizon and try something new. Always remember to take a closer look at things around you; you’ll be sure to find inspiration in the little things. It really doesn’t take much to let your mind wander. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you another collection of brilliant illustrations and photographs. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing The Perfect Slider UX

In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into the fine details of designing better slider controls for selecting a value or a range of values. A slider is helpful because it allows users to explore a wide range of options quickly. The main point of interaction with the slider is to display options quickly. This means not forcing the user to click on a button to see the outcome or wait until the result is displayed. Feedback should be smooth and continuous. However, sliders are just a bit too difficult to use, require just a bit too much precision, are a bit too confusing to navigate, and are a bit too difficult to grab and move around. After a close look at perfect accordions and date and time pickers, let’s turn our attention to sliders, with do’s and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Challenge Yourself More Often By Creating Artwork Every Day

If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you may never discover something that you love doing, or perhaps even worse, never learn a whole lot about yourself. Even the most talented artists out there practice so much more than you’d ever imagine, and hone their skills by trying out copywork. The most important thing is to be confident and simply give it a try. For more encouragement, Vitaly Friedman has collected a good number of inspirational artwork that is bound to give you that spark you need to get started already! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing The Perfect Date And Time Picker

Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing The Perfect Accordion

Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Finding Inspiration In The Little Things Around Us

If we only looked closer, we would find gems of inspiration in the things around us. For Vitaly Friedman, nature is his personal and biggest gem. May is already here and spring has arrived in Belgium, bringing along its bright colors, the delicate odours of blooming flowers, as well as the cheerful chirping of birds. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Vibrant Illustrations To Let Your Mind Wander

It’s good to take a short break and go outside to try and empty your mind. Now the time has come to enjoy these moments even more as the spring season finally starts to show up in nature. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a new batch of illustrations will feed your creativity tank with extra vitamins to make sure those inspiration levels are up and running at its best. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

35 Joyful Easter Wallpaper ? Funny Bunnies And Painted Eggs

Bunnies ahead! These fluffy little fellows are an unmistakable sign that Easter is here. Along with their companions in crime, yellow chicks, of course. But did you know that Easter bunnies can be much more than cute? Some of them have a secret passion for skateboarding, others take it up even with their natural predators to protect their easter eggs. Don’t believe it? Well, wait and see.

In this post, we compiled the best Easter wallpapers from our monthly contest for you. It all started back in 2008 and it’s still running today thanks to the love and patience that artists and designers from all across the globe put into creating unique, inspiring, and, well, simply beautiful, wallpapers each month anew. So without further ado, let’s dive right into the world of bunnies, cheeky chicks, blooming flowers, easter eggs, and — how could we forget — chocolate, of course. Happy Easter!

Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

A Little Surprise Is Waiting For You Here.

Smashing Magazine is changing: a new design, a new layout, a new technical stack, a new printed magazine, a new Smashing Membership, and the same good ol’ obsession with quality content. Today, we are happy to announce the public open beta of the next Smashing Magazine, next.smashingmagazine.com, with a new design, but one with a few bugs and issues that have to be… you know, smashed first. The big-bang release is scheduled for later this year. Here’s a sneak preview of what’s coming up. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Inspiring Illustrations With Plenty Of Bright Colors And Cool Patterns

Most of the time, the weather can’t quite make up its mind, and so the days pass by with half of the sky sunny while the other half gray. With springtime lurking around the corner, our need for extra inspiration is even bigger. So, today, Vitaly Friedman hopes that this month’s set will give you just that spark you need to cheer you up and boost your creativity. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Colorful Inspiration For Gray Days: Illustration And Photography At Their Best

Gray days always are a great time we can use to reflect on our work and perhaps better decide what it is that we hope to improve or change in the next months. They are the spark that sets the process of creation in motion. It doesn’t take much; it can be any part of an element that catches my eye, be it a particular color, style, texture, or anything really. You’ll find a bit of everything in today’s selection: Architecture, colors, some of the best photographs from 2016, and more. We hope you’ll like Vitaly Friedman’s playground! ;) Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

SmashingConf New York 2017: Don’t Let Bad Front-End/UX Be Your Kryptonite!

Don’t you feel like Wonderwoman or Superman when squishing that annoying CSS/JavaScript bug or improving front-end performance, or making the UX workflow smooth at your company? Well, we do! Now, we also love sharing. SmashingConf NYC 2017 won’t solve all complex problems, but once it’s over you’ll know how to conquer yours. With practical front-end and UX techniques, battles, fights, wins and losses, we’d love you to learn and share your special abilities and your experiences! So reserve that plane and meet us in New York City! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Clothing Icons (40 Icons, 9 Styles, AI, EPS, SVG, PNG)

The following set includes 40 icons with everything ranging from shirts, pants and dresses to a blazer, hat and even a scarf. Available in nine styles and four formats (AI, EPS, SVG and PNG). You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. Please note that this icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2017

This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now. In this article, artists and designers from across the globe put their creative skills to the test and created unique desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works, because we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. The following wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Happy New Year! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Front End Performance Checklist 2017 [PDF, Apple Pages]

Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers? A front-end performance checklist of things to keep in mind when optimizing for performance. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

✅ The Ultimate Digital Clean-Up Checklist: Are You Prepared For The New Year?

In this article, you’ll find an overview of all of the obscure little things that I forget about every year; so, I decided to gather them all in one place once and for all. The list below serves as a personal reminder for yours truly, and I thought that it might be useful for you as well. In fact, I set up a yearly reminder on December 28th just to have a couple of days to free the mind for the more important things in life and to start the next year without second thoughts or unresolved issues. Curious? Well, let’s dive in! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (December 2016)

Let’s refuel our inspiration for another month and start working on our New Year’s resolution list. Observe closely at the following techniques used, and how the colors have been applied to add contrast and character. As always, there is a lot to learn. Today, we hope that these illustrations and photographs will inspire you to get creative and get ideas which you can apply in your own projects. Go ahead, don’t let anything come in your way, and let your artistic juices flow! Let’s begin. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: December 2016 - Festive Christmas Edition

In this post, Vitaly Friedman features desktop artwork for December 2016. Each Christmas wallpaper comes in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Now you only need to decide on your favorite! This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now, so we added a little Christmas wallpaper best-of at the bottom of this post with some of the most cheerful, merry and Christmassy designs from previous years. We are very thankful to everyone who challenges their artistic skills and contributes to it each month anew. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Thanksgiving Icon Set (15 Icons, PNG, PSD, AI, SVG)

To those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, we’ve got a nice set of 15 free icons created by the design team at ucraft for you today — all available in PNG, PSD, AI and SVG formats. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. 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 in blog posts or anywhere else. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

SmashingConf San Francisco 2017: Somethin’ Is Cookin’ In The Kitchen!

Coming up in April next year, we have SmashingConf San Francisco 2017, featuring tasty front-end ingredients, UX recipes and neat design beats from the hidden, remote corners of the web. 1 track, 2 conference days, 8 workshops, 16 excellent speakers and just 500 available tickets, taking place on April 4–5, 2017. We’ve put aside 50 early-bird tickets, and if you book a workshop, too, you’ll save $100 off the conference and workshop price. That pretty smashing, isn’t it? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (November 2016)

It’s the season of hazy mornings, and beautiful warm color palettes. In this month’s collection, Vitaly Friedman gathered a couple of illustrations and photos that express this seasonal feeling. The illustration presented above shows a brilliant way of how to spend your days before winter arrives. It’s time to go outside and soak up all those warm colors nature has to offer, especially the vibrant golden-yellow leaves that can now be found almost everywhere you look! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: November 2016

We embarked on a special creativity mission eight years ago: to provide you with inspiring and unique desktop wallpapers every month. Wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd and that are bound to fuel your ideas. Both versions with and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop! We are very thankful to all artists and designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing to this mission. 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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Meet “Inclusive Front-End Design Patterns”, A New Smashing Book

Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings, and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would “add” accessibility on top of the finished product. With our new book, we get to the bottom of it all! Written by Heydon Pickering, a well-respected accessibility expert, the book includes dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you’ll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Taking The Pattern Library To The Next Level

When building a pattern library, we tend to focus too much on the modules, providing a structural view of the system, rather than showing how it can be used effectively — thereby undermining its usefulness to most team members. Finding the right way to architect a lasting pattern library is difficult. This article highlights some practical techniques and strategies to establish a pattern library that will be actively and consistently used by the entire team. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (October 2016)

Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. Illustrating is creativity in its pure form. It is endless and that’s why Vitaly Friedman loves it so much. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: October 2016

This post features designs of artists and designers from across the globe for October 2016. The collection is a mix of ideas and styles, of wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. The themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. A big thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (September 2016)

Let these designs shine on you with their smart details, fantastic textures, and well-chosen color palettes that will undoubtedly help you start the new week with your creativity freshly nurtured. There isn’t a magic formula to rely on. Luckily, this year’s summer vacation was fruitful in providing us with many visual stimuli to get the creative process going. Nothing but design goodness. So please lean back and soak it all in. Enjoy! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

83 Flat Line UX And E-Commerce Icons For Free

Today’s icon sets will come in handy forwWhatever project you may be working on. This exclusive icon pack was tirelessly crafted by the design team at Ecommerce Website Design, and come in various formats that can be used for personal as well as commercial purposes. It is licensed under under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. 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 in blog posts or anywhere else. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2016

Each month we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some inspirational and unique desktop wallpapers. The result is a collection of desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. All of them come in versions with and without a calendar and are free to download. A big thank-you to everyone who shared their artwork! Now, which one will make it to your desktop? Be sure to check out the icy winter wallpaper and our best of wallpaper collection. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Behind The Scenes: What It Takes To Publish A Smashing Article

We publish articles because we love sharing what we learn and what others learn, too; we love discovering unique points of view and surprising design strategies, as well as just understanding how our colleagues out there solve difficult UX and front-end problems. Every single Smashing article goes through a thorough editorial review, including multiple passes for editing and refinement, before being published. In this series dedicated to our upcoming 10th anniversary we will explain our workflow and introduce the people behind the scenes! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (August 2016)

Holiday or no holiday, our need for some fresh inspiration never stops! This month, Vitaly Friedman has found some real treasures! As a designer, Vitaly feels that there is so much that he can learn from the techniques and color combinations in these little gems. Let’s dive in, and get inspired to leave your comfort zones for your next designs! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: August 2016

On a quest to cater for wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd, we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting and inspiring designs each month anew. This post features wallpapers to get your desktop ready for August 2016. They all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. A big thank-you to everyone who tickled their creativity and contributed their ideas! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Olympics Sports Icon Set (45 Icons, EPS, PDF, PNG, SVG)

Wouldn’t it be great to have a set of consistent icons for all sports-related activities? This set of 45 icons was created by the design team at Icons8. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. A big thank you to Icons8 — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts. Keep up the brilliant work! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Grab Your Sunglasses: 40 Vibrant Icons To Welcome Summer

This set of 40 icons was created by the design team at Printerinks.com. Please note that this icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. A big thank you to Printerinks — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts. Keep up the brilliant work! 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 in blog posts or anywhere else. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration For July

There’s no doubt that there are a lot of great techniques out there — they just need to be discovered. Today Vitaly Friedman would like to share a couple of inspirational illustrations and photos which he hopes will help you daydream and relax. You’ll notice some pretty interesting and refreshing color combinations… Get ready to enter the summer with a big spark of inspiration! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: July 2016

This monthly creativity mission has been going on for eight years now, and each month the enthusiastic work of the community brings forth interesting, beautiful, and unique results. Wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features designs for July 2016, and can be downloaded for free. A big thank-you to everyone who contributed their ideas! Now could there be a better occasion to freshen up your desktop? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

12 Colorful Months And Seasons Illustrations [Freebie]

Every month of the year comes loaded with unique energy, so that it can give us inspiration and ideas, and then leave so many special memories behind. This background collection, dedicated to the charm and uniqueness of the twelve months of the year and its seasons, is available in PNG, SVG, AI and EPS and is all set to energize any project it becomes a part of. A big thank you to the team at GraphicMama — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts. Keep up the brilliant work! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

How To Roll Out New Features Without Hurting Loyal Users

The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (June 2016)

Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. From 3D illustrations to artwork created with ink and watercolors, Vitaly is sure there’s something that’ll spark your inspiration. Be warned though, some of them may even give you wanderlust from just looking at them. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: June 2016

This creativity mission has been going on for eight years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed to it and who are still enthusiastically continuing to do so each month. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. It’s time to give your desktop a makeover! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smart Responsive Design Patterns, Or When Off-Canvas Isn’t Good Enough

When we design responsive websites, we tend to see responsive design merely as a collection of slightly differently sized rectangles, with a slightly different layout, sometimes with slightly different content poured into them. In this article, Vitaly Friedman features some of the slightly more obscure design patterns, such as responsive car-builder interfaces, mega dropdown navigation, content grids, maps and charts, as well as responsive art direction. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Otherworldly Space Icons [Freebie]

There’s so much to explore in the world of astronomy, and it’s about time we did. In this article, we bring you an icon set created and designed by the team at Iconshock, No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. 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 in blog posts or anywhere else. So, dear space troopers out there, what are you waiting for? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (May 2016)

Let these designs shine on you with their smart details, fantastic textures, and well-chosen color palettes that will undoubtedly help you start the new week with your creativity freshly nurtured. This time Vitaly Friedman has collected a potpourri of styles ranging from delicate and subtle to bold and playful. Nothing but design goodness. So please lean back and soak it all in. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

On Design Systems: Sell The Output, Not The Workflow

In his article on Selling Design Systems, Dan Mall suggests to illustrate how fractured an organization is by printing out its different presences online and putting them on a large board as an example of all the wasted money and effort that goes into making sites from scratch, one-by-one, needlessly reinventing the wheel every time. What Vitaly Friedman learned from his experience is that trying to focus on the workflow or the process is never as helpful as focusing on tangible benefits that the client will get as a result. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

39 Tuneful Musical Instruments Icons [Freebie]

Designed by the team behind IconCrafts, this music instrument icon set is dedicated to all music lovers. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. Please note that the set is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. We kindly ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to IconCrafts for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: May 2016

We discovered the best source for inspiration: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar for May 2016 and can be downloaded for free. This creativity mission has been going on for eight years now and artists and designers from across the globe got their creative juices flowing to produce desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. A big thank-you to everyone who contributed their works! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Hotel And Spa Icon Set (55 Icons PNG, SVG)

This wonderful hotel and spa icon set can help you to design a visually delightful holiday experience for the customers of your tourism clients. Designed by the team behind IconCrafts, this icons come in five styles different styles. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. We kindly ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to IconsCraft for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the great work! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: April 2016

It’s time to get your desktop ready for spring! Designers and artists from across the globe shared their creations with us for April 2016. The result is a collection of desktop wallpapers with a unique mix of ideas and styles, eye candy that is bound to cater for new idea sparks. We are very thankful to everyone who has contributed to this challenge and who keeps the steady stream of wallpapers flowing by sharing their artworks each month anew. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Printed Smashing Books

We proudly craft affordable, practical books for pros like yourself who want to improve skills and make a difference. No fluff, no theory — just actionable insights applicable to your work right away. In this article, we bring you a quick overview of the last ones! We take pride in the time and efforts we put into creating our Smashing Books. We sincerely appreciate your support and trust — without you, we wouldn’t be able to release the books, and you should know that. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Useful WordPress Tools, Themes And Plugins

If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Dirty Tricks From The Dark Corners Of Front-End (Slides, PDF)

Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day. Vitaly Friedman loves finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Monday Morning Design Inspiration

As Veerle Pieters explores print and web design, photography, art and type, she uncovers a lot of brilliant design gems. She has compiled a selection of inspirational examples for you in this showcase, and the plan is to bring out a new one every month, so let us know in the comments if you like what you see. But for now, please lean back and enjoy! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

A Never-Ending Story On Ad-Blockers

Vitaly Friedman believes that blocking loyal readership isn’t a reasonable option for any website. Relying on donations for an “ad-free experience” is unlikely to work either. Publishers should figure out a way to initiate an honest, direct conversation with their readers and find a respectful and profitable way of dealing with the ad revenue gap. Fighting against ad-blocking extensions is a fight against windmills. Ad-blockers have the upper hand, and while advertising will evolve, and it will become less disturbing and annoying, it remains to see if the trust users lost in traditional display advertising can be regained. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: March 2016

It’s time to freshen up your desktop! This post features desktop wallpapers for March 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop! Please note that 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. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Riddle #7 Resolved: New York Pizza, Jules Verne And 28 Hong Kong Street

When we started out with riddles, we wanted to have an entertaining yet challenging game that wouldn’t be easy to crack, and would keep our dear readers busy for quite some time. So, let’s get to the bottom of this! It was quite a journey, but we hope it was worth it. Also, a kind “thank you” to all the friends who sent out quite ridiculous, spammy and unrelated tweets at just the right time, so that this game would become possible in the first place. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

72 Home Appliance And Real Estate Icons [Freebie]

Today we’re happy to release a lovely free icon set with 72 related icons. The set includes icons in 4 sizes and in 8 formats: AI, CSH, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, Sketch and Webfont. The icon set is free to use in personal and commercial projects. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to the team over at Round Icons for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the great work! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Automatically Art-Directed Responsive Images? Here You Go.

Ideally, we’d love to have one tool that would either generate “smart enough” crops and plug in the responsive images markup in the build automatically, or provide one interface to visually adjust the focal point of images and output “ready-to-go” markup. We aren’t quite there yet, but we might be soon. In the meantime, the tools listed in this article could be good enough options to consider when tackling a quite daunting task of producing art-directed variants of images — either manually or by building custom CMS plugins. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Design Mock-Ups Need Dynamic Content: Tools And Plugins

In practice, mock-ups usually represent a perfect experience in a perfect context with perfect data which doesn’t really exist. A good example for it are “optimal” usernames which are perfectly short, fit on a single line on mobile and wrap nicely, or perfect photography that allows for perfectly legible text overlays. Nothing is perfect on the web. We need to craft future-proof experiences. We use little helpers all the time, and they prove to be great tools to build websites that are prepared for everything that comes their way. They also reflect reality much better than perfect mock-ups with perfect heights and perfect names and email addresses ever would. Stay resilient — that’s the true power of the web. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: February 2016

Today’s post features a collection of unique desktop wallpapers for February 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions, with and without a calendar, and can be downloaded for free. Created by designers and artists from across the globe, they are just waiting to give your desktop a makeover and provide you with some fresh inspiration. Now you only need to decide which one will accompany you through the month — and that won’t be easy given all the creative ideas the community has come up with. A big thank-you to everyone who participated! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Printed Smashing Books

We proudly craft affordable, practical books for pros like yourself who want to improve skills and make a difference. Our printed Smashing Books deliver in-depth knowledge and expertise shared by experts and practitioners from the industry. We strongly believe in print and in the benefits of tangible books — they are our editorial flagships. No fluff, no theory — just actionable insights applicable to your work right away. In this article, you will find all of our Smashing Books, which look damn good on a coffee table! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: December 2015

This post features artwork for December 2015. Each month, we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting and inspiring desktop wallpapers. And well, we are very thankful to everyone who tickles their creativity and contributes to this challenge every month. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Now it’s up to you to decide: which one will deck your desktop this month? All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

No Hard Feelings: The Wait For “Hardboiled Web Design” Is Over

Technologies should never hold you back, and this book is nothing short of a strategic guide on how to use them efficiently to build flexible, scalable responsive systems today. Dive deep into how to actually apply mobile first to a design workflow, learn about the multi-column layout and how you can use it today, move towards designing atoms and elements first, and learn how to establish style guides, and much more! The brand new Hardboiled Web Design by Andrew Clarke is a book you deserve to have on your desk. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Travel Icons To Spruce Up Your Designs [Freebie]

Today, we’re happy to release the Voyage Icon Set, a set of 40 free icons designed and created by Print Express and is free to use in private as well as commercial projects. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word about the freebie. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: November 2015

Each month we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative wallpapers. And, well, it wasn’t any different this time around. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. A big thank you to all designers for their participation Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: October 2015

Since seven years, we challenge the design community to participate in our wallpaper mission and each month designers and artists from across the globe enthusiastically contribute their work to it. The result is a unique mix of ideas and styles, eye candy that is bound to cater for new idea sparks. This post features desktop wallpapers for October 2015. We are very thankful to everyone who took the challenge and shared their designs with us this month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: World Landmark Icons (AI, EPS, PDF, PNG and PSD)

This article contains 18 lovely world landmark icons such as the London Eye, the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. The icons are detailed enough to show architectural elegance but without adding chaos. They’re designed to work best in both digital and print media. As always, the icons are available for free download and use in all private and commercial projects. Again, as long as you don’t resell bundles of the illustrations, you can use the illustrations for anything you need. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

It’s The Smashing Birthday Party, And You Are Invited (With Goodies!)

Our work serves the community and belongs to everybody, and as a team, we are happy and privileged to do what we truly love, and we know that this wouldn’t be possible without your kind and generous support. So thanks for sticking around. We’ve prepared a little something for you to celebrate the day: a chapter on responsive design patterns (free PDF), a Mystery Riddle, a new free eBook and a birthday special: if you grab the hardcover of the Smashing Book 5 today, you’ll get five Smashing eBooks as a gift for your kind support. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The New Smashing Mystery Riddle #6 (Failed): Have You Figured It Out Yet?

We’ve hidden secret keys in different (physical) locations across the world. To move from one level to another, you’ll have to find a hidden print-out in all (four) locations. Watch out for GIF file names. Below you’ll find the first animated GIF that contains a location clue. Identify the location, go there and find a hidden print-out. Once you’ve reached the last level (you’ll know when), just tweet out all the keys in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Alright, let’s get down to business. Are you ready? Action! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2015

We embarked on a special creativity mission seven years ago: to provide you with inspiring and unique desktop wallpapers every month. This post features their artwork for September 2015, and we are very thankful to all artists and designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing to this mission, who challenge their artistic abilities each month anew to keep the steady stream of wallpapers flowing. This post features their artwork for September 2015. Both versions with and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: August 2015

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 August 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

60 Lovely Workspace Illustrations [Freebie]

In this article, we release a set of 60 lovely workspace illustrations of items that many web and graphic designers use every day. The set has been designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko, from Minsk, Belarus, and released for free for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all these elements and others for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything. Thanks to Anastasia Kolisnichenko for releasing the illustrations — we’re very grateful for your talent and generosity! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Web Design Is Dead. No, It Isn’t.

Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community. Web technologies are fantastic. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashicons – A Carefully Crafted Iconset in 4 Styles [Freebie]

Today, we’re happy to release a very large icon set: the freebie contains 500 icons in four editable variants: outlined, solid, webby and flat, covering all sorts of various categories. The icons allow you to customize the stroke width and style, not to mention that you can change the color of the elements. They’re carefully crafted on a 60px grid which gives each icon consistency and crispness on all displays. Smashicons come in several styles. The AI and Sketch formats come in four styles: outline for mobile use; solid for hover state; webby for web; and flat for any creative project. The PSD format comes in two styles: outline for mobile use, and solid for hover states. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: July 2015

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 July 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Responsive Sports Icons [Freebie]

Today, we’re happy to release a free set of 40 sports icons in four styles and six formats. Each icon in this set comes in four styles: flat colored, glyph, Google material palette, and line strokes. All icons are included in six formats: AI, PSD, SVG, PNG, CSH and Sketch. Additionally, the line icons morph into four responsive sizes, comprising a unique icon at every breakpoint. That way, details adjust according to size while preserving the icons’ style and identity. The set is still in its infancy with plenty more icons currently in production. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: June 2015

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 June 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed with this creativity mission and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: May 2015

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 May 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

That’s Real-Life Responsive Web Design: Meet The Brand New Smashing Book 5

Responsive design is a default these days, but we are all still figuring out just the right process and techniques to better craft responsive websites. That’s why we created a new book — to gather practical techniques and strategies from people who have learned how to get things done right. Our brand new *Smashing Book 5, *neatly packed in a gorgeous hardcover, covers time-saving, practical techniques for crafting fast, maintainable and scalable responsive websites. Just like all of our Smashing Books, the book isn’t concerned with trends or short-lived workarounds. It focuses on the actual design process. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: April 2015

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 April 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Swifticons Icon Set (92 Icons, AI, Sketch, PNG, SVG, EPS, PDF)

Today, we’re happy to release a quite unique icon set. The goodie contains 92 icons in three editable variants: outlined, filled & colored, covering 15 wide categories. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: March 2015

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 March 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Mystery #5 Is Resolved: Northern Lights, Windmills And The Game Of The Century

This time we decided to turn our mystery riddle into an exercise of patience and stubbornness — beyond problem solving, of course. To achieve just that, we had to hide the right answers properly and provide subtle hints that attentive readers would need to discover first. So, what if we looked closely at the things around us and introduced a riddle that would reflect those experiences? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: February 2015

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 February 2015. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for almost seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Mystery Riddle #5: Have You Figured It Out Yet?

The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC 2015, we’ve prepared a new mystery riddle, and this one will be an exercise in patience and stubborness. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden Twitter hashtag. Your job is to discover those hashtags as fast as possible. If your guess for a hashtag is right, search for that hashtag on Twitter and you’ll find a tweet leading you to the next level. Are you ready? Action! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Delightful Dashel Iconset [Freebie]

We are humbled to release a set of 45 free icons available in SVG, PSD and PNG formats, released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Designed by Print Express. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2015

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? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

100 Fantastic Tourism & Travel Icons [Freebie]

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

100 Responsive And Mobile Icons [Freebie]

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! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: December 2014 (Christmas Edition)

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 December 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for almost seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

100 Handsome Hand-Drawn Doodle Icons [Freebie]

Today, we’re happy to release a quite special hand-drawn doodle icon set that has been created by Roundicons and can be used for both private and commercial projects. This icon set is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. 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. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

45 Colorful Flat Icons [Freebie]

This icons are completely free to use for commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. 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. Thank you to Amie Andrews and the creative minds behind Whoishostingthis — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the brilliant work! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: November 2014

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 November 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. This creativity mission has been going on for almost seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Conferences & Workshops

We’ve set up a couple of new adventures for SmashingConf 2018 — just practical sessions, new formats, new lightning talks, evening sessions and genuine, interesting conversations — with a dash of friendly networking! Taking place in London, San Francisco, Toronto. To give everybody a chance to buy ticket in time, we are releasing all tickets in batches this time! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Let’s Travel The World: 100 Trendy Touristic Icons [Freebie]

Today’s icon set consists of a set of vector icons that represent monuments across the globe, so they can be literally used anywhere. This colorful set was carefully designed by Freepik and is completely free to use for commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. 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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Freebie: Icons Of Autumn (50 Icons, EPS)

We are humbled to release a set of 50 free autumn-themed EPS icons illustrated in a lovely sketchy style. Designed by Nick Botner as line art in Adobe Illustrator, the icons are available in EPS, enabling you to change both the color or the weight of the strokes with ease. This icon set is licensed under a Creative Commons. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

“There Are More Bugs In Mobile Than… Particles In The Universe!”

If you run into technical problems in mobile, then you’ll know how annoying fixing them can be. We have all been there. But no, mobile isn’t actually dark matter, but it does require you to learn a few new things, some of which are quite confusing. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Peter-Paul Koch to create The Mobile Web Handbook, our practical new guide to dealing with front-end challenges in mobile. The book is finally ready and is now shipping worldwide! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: October 2014

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 October 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Improving Smashing Magazine’s Web Performance: A Case Study

Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn’t feel like a long journey at all. We’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last years about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. In this article you will find a little story about the things that happened on this little website over the last year. Thanks for keeping us reading throughout all these years. It means a lot. You are quite smashing indeed. You should know that. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2014

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 September 2014. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: August 2014

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 August 2014. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

“Making It Right”: Product Management For A Startup World

To bring order into projects, a new product manager is appointed, under huge expectation, and with unclear responsibilities and big goals defined within a very short timeframe. Making It Right is a book about just that: what product management is and how to approach it strategically and meaningfully to get things done well. If your company has to address these issues or you’re looking for a hands-on book to guide you through product management, this is the book for you! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Mystery #4 Is Resolved: Chirpy Birds, Lost Numbers and Pretty Slow Wheels

Smashing Mystery Riddles are little experiments that challenge us to come up with something new, original and a bit crazy—every single time. The ideas are usually a synthesis of the things we discover, stumble upon or try out ourselves—and oh my, they take quite some time to get right. The basic idea for the most recent riddle was simple: as usual, you have a series of animated GIFs containing clues. One animated GIF leads to another, and every animated GIF contains a key that have to be discovered. Once you uncover all the keys, you construct a solution and send out a tweet containing that solution. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Mystery Riddle #4: Have You Figured It Out Yet?

To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf Whistler, our very first conference in Canada, we’ve prepared a yet another riddle, and of course this time it’s not going to be any easier! How does it work this time? Below you’ll find the first of a few hidden animated GIFs that contain a secret Twitter hashtag.  Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the hints in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Let’s get to business. Are you ready? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The New Smashing Mystery Riddle: Have You Figured It Out Yet?

To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf Whistler, our very first conference in Canada, we’ve prepared a yet another riddle, and of course this time it’s not going to be any easier! How does it work this time? Below you’ll find the first of a few hidden animated GIFs that contain a secret Twitter hashtag.  Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the hints in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Let’s get to business. Are you ready? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

36 Beautiful Rounded Icons - Meet The Ballicons 2 [Freebie]

Icons are a simple, effective way to draw users into the content of your website. Today’s icon set consists of a set of icons in two styles (flat and light gradient). The icons have been carefully designed by PixelBuddha and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It’s completely free to use for commercial or personal applications without any restrictions. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: June 2014

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 June 2014 that can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Colorful Flat Summer Icons [Freebie]

Today, we’re pleased to feature an icon set that will help make the wait for summer to finally arrive, worthwhile. In this piece you will find an icon set that includes 50 icons that have been designed by Elena Genova exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. If you’ve been looking for a way to freshen up your designs with even more colors, then this freebie will not disappoint you. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: May 2014

As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for May 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Meet The Mobile Web Handbook

With Responsive Web Design becoming a convenient strategy for device-agnostic design, we keep running into annoying technical issues that all those quirky mobile browsers are raising so very often. Inconsistent CSS/JavaScript support, mobile fragmentation and complicated nuances such as device pixels, viewports, zooming, pointer/click events and the 300ms delay. To make sense of it all, we created The Mobile Web Handbook. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

60 Astonishing Flat Icons For Free

This freebie contains 60 icons that have been designed in both round and flat styles, and can be used for free without any restrictions and serve various design purposes. Crafted with great attention to detail, today’s icon set is extremely easy to use and will most probably be the next ultimate resource for any of your design projects. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons, and use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: April 2014

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for April 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Mystery #3 Is Resolved: A Story Of Muffin Crumbs, Shady Characters And Invisible Letters

At SmashingMag, we cherish the idea of lasting traditions—be it monthly desktop wallpapers, editorial newsletters or those weird mystery riddles. So in the spirit of tradition, the riddle had to be based on animated GIFs. During an intensive, unscheduled, battery-recharge brainstorming session, we came up with a number of interesting ideas, all thoroughly written down, tagged and ready for use. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Mystery Riddle #3: Have You Figured It Out Yet?

The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of Paul Boag’s Digital Adaptation book, we’ve prepared a new riddle, and this time it’s a bit different and a bit easier. Below you’ll find three animated GIFs that contain a hidden message. Once you’ve resolved the mystery, please tweet the full sentence @smashingmag using the hashtag #smashing. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

31 Stunning Spring Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: March 2014

As designers, we usually turn to 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 March 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Welcome To The Smashing WordPress Section

There are plenty of beginner tutorials, round-up posts, and code snippets, but few good places to go for more advanced, in-depth content about WordPress. In this section, we’re aiming for quality articles on intermediate-level topics, with an emphasis on developing smarter and faster sites, with the world’s most popular publishing platform. If you’re new to WordPress, we’ve got a series of tutorials lined up that will get you up to speed on techniques we’ll be exploring in future articles. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: February 2014

As designers, we usually turn to desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. And in today’s post, we feature free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for February 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Mystery Riddle #2: Have You Figured It Out Yet?

The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC, we’ve prepared a new riddle, and this time it’s not going to be any easier, but the reward is worth the effort. In this piece, you’ll find an animated GIF that contains a hidden message. Once you’ve resolved the mystery, you’ll see a Twitter hashtag displayed in plain text. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

60 Stylish Round Icons - Meet The Roundicons

Today, we’re honored to present to you a set of 60 vector round icons, Released exclusively for Smashing Magazine! Crafted with great attention to detail and cleverly designed by the creative trio at Roundicons, this icon set is extremely easy to use and will most probably be the next ultimate resource for any one of your design projects. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required. However, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not allowed. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2014

As designers, we usually turn to desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This article features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for January 2014. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Exo 2.0, A Contemporary Geometric Sans Serif Font [Freebie]

Two years ago, Portuguese graphic and type designer Natanael Gama started to play with glyphs — as a way to discover typography. Doodling around, he created Exo, a font which he released for free in a Kickstarter project which turned out to be quite successful, and Natanael did a complete redesign. Today, he is no longer a student and Exo has evolved into Exo 2.0, an elegant, contemporary geometric sans serif typeface. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: December 2013 (Christmas Edition)

As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one: distinctive desktop wallpapers. This article features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for December 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop wallpaper! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Book 4 (Nov 2013)

Written by well-respected designers and developers, the book contains lots of actionable takeaways that will help you improve your workflow. Think of it as a reliable playbook for issues that keep following you in every project. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

128 Colorful Nice Things Icons For Free

In this article, we are honoured to present to you Nice Things a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that Chris Behr came up with while playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. He casually divided a square into a grid and then randomly colored it. Then he combined the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling.  Let’s see the results! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: November 2013

As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration, and we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than usual. We’re very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for November 2013. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: October 2013

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Good Content Is Too Valuable To Die

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

33 Tempting E-Commerce Icons [Freebie]

In this article, we feature a set of 33 flat e-commerce icons, created exclusively for Smashing Magazine by Responsive. The icons are suited to e-commerce projects and include many popular payment providers. The set includes Photoshop and Illustrator files containing all of the icons. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Seven Years That Changed Everything

Today, we celebrate our seventh anniversary, and you are the ones who have made it possible! A huge thank you to you for being so helpful, engaging and supportive, and for staying with us all this time, and for reading our books on night trains. It means the world to us. You mean the world to us. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2013

In this article, you will find free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all the designers who have contributed. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Type & Grids: Free Responsive HTML5 Template

We are pleased to introduce Type & Grids, a free responsive HTML5 template by Jeremiah Shoaf. All of the content resides in a single HTML file, so setting it up is super-simple. Its extensive customization options set Type & Grids apart from other templates out there. Each type theme is meticulously handcrafted, with attention paid to the smallest typographic details. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: August 2013

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 “Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: August 2013”) This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: July 2013

This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for July 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Editor’s Choice: A Free eBook

Half a year ago, we introduced our eBook subscription model, also known as the Smashing Library. We didn’t want to limit the library to just our own content, so we are now including a growing number of industry-related eBooks. These books are by authors who aren’t necessarily affiliated with Smashing Magazine but who produce great content. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

16 Lovely St. Valentine’s Day ? Icons For Free

It is our great pleasure to present to you a fantastic St. Valentine’s icon set  —  exclusively designed by our illustrator Ricardo Gimenes for Smashing Magazine and its loyal readers. The icons presented are available in transparent and non-transparent PNGs, as well as in EPS format and are perfect for any projects you have coming up for St. Valentine’s Day. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: February 2013

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Christmas Icon Set (10 Quality Icons, 256×256px PNG)

Today, we have a beautiful Christmas icon freebie for you created by the talented, hard-working folks at RocketTheme. The icon set contains ten icons available as 256×256px PNGs that have been lovingly and exclusively prepared for Smashing Magazine and the Web design community. As usual, this set is released under a Creative Commons license and can be used in commercial and private projects. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Exclusive Videos And Interviews (Part 1)

In September 2012 we ran the very first Smashing Conference — friendly, valuable and inspiring community event — in a beautiful medieval building in our home town Freiburg, Germany. The conference was a huge success, and we haven’t anticipated the fantastic feedback we’ve received during and after the event. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Introducing The Smashing eBook Library

Web design is an ever-changing industry, and to keep getting better at your craft and stay up-to-date with what’s going on, you need to invest a lot of time and effort in getting reliable, good quality content. The Smashing Library grants you immediate unlimited access to all Smashing eBooks including digital versions of our printed books. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

42 Chunky Pika Style Icons [Freebie]

You may be looking to brighten up your checkout page with a more original shopping cart icon or perhaps you’re designing a website from scratch that requires a shrimp icon. Either way, this set of chunky pixel-perfect icon might be just what you need. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

A Look Inside Smashing Magazine

So far, you have seen only one side of our little publication. Articles get published, and you, dear reader, take care of the rest: promoting the article throughout your social channels and sharing it with colleagues offline. It’s about time you got to know us better. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2012

We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2012. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful iPhone And iPad Retina Wallpapers

Back in 2009, Smashing Magazine presented 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers. In the meantime Apple has shaken the industry with iPhones 4, 4S and 5, as well as iPad 1, 2, 3, and not to forget to mention the brand new iPad mini and iPad 4 — devices that steal the show with the best ever displays and gigantic resolutions. Having your hands on these masterpieces, how about enriching your device with a high-resolution Retina wallpaper that makes your thingamajig look even better than it already does. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Bored?

In this overview you will find posts featuring some of the more entertaining articles which have been published on Smashing Magazine over all the years. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Delightful High-Quality Free Fonts

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice out there is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: March 2012

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Book #3: All Good Things Come In Threes

Yes, the brand new Smashing Book #3 is coming. The printing press is warming up, the illustrations are finished, and the chapters are being proofread. This third book is the best printed book we’ve produced so far: it is a valuable, cutting-edge, high-quality printed book that any Web designer should have on their bookshelf. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

10 Free St. Valentine’s Day Icons ???

Every now and then, we release useful freebies for all of our highly valued readers. Today, it is our pleasure to present to you Cuberto’s fantastic St. Valentine’s icon set  —  exclusively designed for Smashing Magazine and its loyal readers. The icons presented are available in transparent PNGs as well as Photoshop PSDs (128x128 px) and are perfect for any projects you have coming up for St. Valentine’s Day. Enjoy! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: February 2012

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

23 Splendid High-Quality Free Fonts

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Free New Twitter Profile Page GUI PSD

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a Twitter GUI PSD for the recently released Twitter UI update, designed by Jon Darke and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The PSD provides the full mockup with all layers in vectors, allowing you to scale up the design elements without loss of quality. The set includes two versions: one for personal accounts and also the new Twitter Enhanced profile page with 835×90 header image for brands and advertisers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

20 Festive Christmas Icons [Freebie]

The year is slowly coming to an end and we’re glad to present to you a festive icon set to inspire you in your designs. In this post we present a minimalist collection of 20 free festive vector (.EPS) icons created by offset media. The pack includes color and grayscale versions. The pack includes mostly Christmas related icons, such us the gingerbread man, nutcracker, snowman and the very well-known fir tree. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December 2011

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Smashing Cartoons

Smashing Cartoons was a regular section on Smashing Magazine in which we used to publish a new cartoon every Friday illustrated by the one and only Ricardo Gimenes. All of the cartoons are dedicated to design and Web development, but also have a comic twist about everything happening around the Web as well as give you some insights behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: April 2011

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for almost two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: March 2011

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for almost two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

CSS: Innovative Techniques and Practical Solutions

Although CSS isn’t that difficult, useful CSS techniques are not easy to find. Sometimes finding a cross-browser solution might take time, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Other designers may have had the same problem in the past and thus the main goal of this round-up is to share with you a goldmine of new techniques which you will hopefully find very useful and valuable. We also hope that these tutorials and articles will help you solve common design problems and find new ways of approaching tricky CSS issues. The main goal of the article is to present powerful new CSS techniques, encourage experimentation in the design community and push CSS forward. Please notice that we feature both experimental demos and practical techniques in this article. Next week we will present even more useful new tools and resources for front-end developers. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of the design community — thank you, guys! Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Useful Web Services, Tools and Resources For Web Designers

We know how hard it is to find good useful tools that all of your developers and designers out there spend hours searching for. And for that reason, we’re regularly collecting useful online web services, tools and resources — little time-savers that can boost every designer’s workflow and save time that would otherwise be required for mundane tasks. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: January 2011

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for almost two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

25 Impressive Free High-Quality Fonts

Every now and then we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to. [Links repaired January/15/2017] Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Why We Should Start Using CSS3 And HTML5 Today

For a while now, here on Smashing Magazine, we have taken notice of how many designers are reluctant to embrace the new technologies such as CSS3 or HTML5 because of the lack of full cross-browser support for these technologies. Many designers are complaining about the numerous ways how the lack of cross-browser compatibility is effectively holding us back and tying our hands — keeping us from completely being able to shine and show off the full scope of our abilities in our work. Many are holding on to the notion that once this push is made, we will wake to a whole new Web — full of exciting opportunities just waiting on the other side. So they wait for this day. When in reality, they are effectively waiting for Godot. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December 2010

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use a specific wallpaper for a longer period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers for over 12 months. To make them a little more distinctive than the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you happen to be searching for a specific day of the month, 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 for December 2010. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. Please notice: * all images can be clicked on 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 what wallpapers have we received for December 2010? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques

Web typography has evolved a lot over the last years. Today we see rich, accessible typography, a plethora of type design choices for the web and a number of remarkable, type-based web designs. It’s a great time for web design, and it’s a great time for web typography. Still, being as excited as we are, we should not forget about the foundational principles of good type design on the web and use them properly within our projects. Great choice is good, but, most importantly, we should be making meaningful typographic choices in our designs. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Free High Quality Icons Sets

Feel free to make yourself a cup of tea or coffee right now because you’ll be investing an hour or so in today’s post. We’ve published our last icons round-up six months ago and since then we’ve collected over 50 new free high quality icon sets that you can use for your projects. While most freebies may be used for commercial projects as well, some of them may not. However, you could use all of them in your private projects. If the set is available for private use only, it’s clearly indicated in the caption. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

18 Credit Card, Debit Card and Payment Icons [Freebie]

Today we are glad to release a Payment Icon Set, a set with 18 payment icons in PNG format, in the resolutions 32×32px — 128×128px. This set was designed by Phil Matthews and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are inteded to be used on e-commerce websites where you can show what types of payment the shop accepts. Each icon comes in curved and straight edge variations. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

There are tools that make our lives much easier. However, finding those obscure time-savers which would save time in every single project isn’t easy and requires a lot of time. At Smashing Magazine, we are regularly looking for such useful tools, gather them, review them and eventually prepare for a truly smashing round-up. Such posts are quite lengthy and extensive, but they are always worth checking out. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tutorials and Tools

These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing! In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well. Our job is to promote good, high-quality content and resources. If you wrote or developed something useful, contact us — we will do our best to spread the word and help you out. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Useful Photoshop Techniques, Tutorials and Tools

As web designers, we always have something new to learn. Over the last decade our workflow has changed dramatically — it’s become more sophisticated and highly diversified. Not only do we have a much larger variety of improved tools to use; there’s also an endless stream of new techniques emerging and spreading within the web design community via social networks. [Updated June/14/2017] Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Keynotopia Wireframing Set: Free Wireframing Templates for Apple Keynote

Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today’s freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

65 Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: September 2010

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Modernist: Free WordPress Theme with Focus on Typography

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a beautiful Modernist WordPress theme, designed by Rodrigo Galindez and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

55 Beautiful Free High-Quality Fonts To Jazz Up Your Designs

Every now and then we look around, select fresh high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to. In this selection, we’re pleased to present Piron, Nobile, St Marie, Code, Arcus, Crimson Text, Quadranta, Juice, Prociono, Mr Jones, Ibarra Real and various useful symbol fonts. Please note that some fonts are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts; they can change from time to time. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers

An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Free Full Layered Facebook GUI PSD Kit

In this post we release a free Facebook GUI PSD Kit, designed by SurgeWorks and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. As usual, the kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

12 CMS Icons For Content Management Systems [Freebie]

Today we are glad to release CMS Icon Set, a set with 12 high quality icons in 48×48px, available in the .png-format. The set was designed to be used in content management systems, but can also be useful for other user interface designs. This goodie was designed by the Russian design studio Pixel-Mixer and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Showcase of Sweet Chocolate Websites

The word chocolate can be associated with many words: dark, white, milk, hot, sweet, spicy, etc. But have you tried to combine it with the word web design? We did. We searched the Web for websites in any way related to chocolate and what we found is worth to be collected in this showcase. The interesting thing is that you would probably never stumble upon some of the sites, so the overview below may provide you with a unique perspective and get your creative juices flowing. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

CSS3 Design Ideas

To get you really excited about CSS3, last month we announced the CSS3 Design Contest and encouraged designers to experiment and get creative with CSS3. As expected, we have received many creative and original submissions. To choose the winners of the contest, we considered the originality of the technique or approach and its uniqueness. The idea mattered more than the execution. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Showcase of Beautiful Photography

Sometimes, a picture can be powerful enough to be inspirational material all by itself. To provide you with some inspiration for the upcoming week, this sunday we feature some truly beautiful and impressive images from talented artists and photographers worldwide. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Showcase of Wonderful Photography

Sometimes, a picture can be powerful enough to be inspirational material all by itself. To provide you with some inspiration for the upcoming week, this sunday we feature some truly beautiful and impressive images from talented artists and photographers worldwide. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Hello. Let’s talk.

Whatever you would like to share with us, we are always prepared to listen. Our email system forwards messages to our Smashing team members, who take care of inquiries as soon as possible. To receive an answer, you will need to provide us with your email address, of course. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Start Using CSS3 Today: Techniques and Tutorials

We have been publishing articles about CSS3 for a while now, and we keep receiving angry e-mails from some developers who complain that it doesn’t make sense to use CSS3 today. Yes, Internet Explorer doesn’t support most CSS3 properties. And yes, CSS3 vendor prefixes are bad for maintainability (and this is why we recommend extracting vendor prefixes in a separate CSS3 file). Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials

Over the last years we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what CSS does, how it works and how we can use it for our layouts, typography and visual presentation of the content. However, there are still some attributes that are not so well-known; also, CSS3 offers us new possibilities and tools that need to be understood, learned and then applied in the right context to the right effect. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

FIFA Football World Cup 2010 Wallpapers (for Minimalism Lovers)

The 2010 Football World Cup is coming up in a couple of days and we decided to celebrate this event with an exclusive set of very simple Footbal World Cup wallpapers for minimalism lovers, created by Oliver Twardowski especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The World Cup will be held in South Africa, between 11 June and 11 July 2010, and will involve 32 teams competing for the title. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Download a Free Magento Theme: HelloWired

Magento, an open source e-commerce web application, is often a good choice for an e-commerce website. The system is quite powerful and the community around the product is strong, making Magento one of the first options to consider when choosing an engine for your online shop. In this post we present our first Magento-release: a simple and beautiful HelloWired Magento Theme, designed by HelloThemes and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme features a clean white background with a simple navigation that will allow you to customize the colors very easily. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

28 Ideas And Examples Of Amazing Paper Art

The times when paper was considered to be the primary medium for artistic expression is long gone. Many writers and designers use digital media to improvise and develop their ideas. However, there is something particuliar in this “physical” canvas — something that keeps us getting back to paper when we want to brainstorm ideas in a notebook, doodle around in a sketchbook, collect inspiration in a scrapbook or just draw some sketches for the next project. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

12 Free Icons to Charm Up Your Online Portfolio

Today we are glad to release a Designer’s Portfolio Icon Set, a set with 12 original high-quality icons in the resolution 256×256px. This set was designed by MediaLoot and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Both layered PSDs and transparent PNGs are included. The set contains icons related to avatar, portfolio, brushes, mail / envelope, color palette, colored pencils, tablet, laptop computer, moleskine notebook, DSLR camera, easel with canvas and coffee cup. [Links checked March/03/2017] Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Web Design Trends 2010: Real-Life Metaphors and CSS3 Adaptation

In our earlier article about Web design trends for 2010 we covered the strong influence of print design techniques, keypress navigation, horizontal layouts, rich typography and aesthetically pleasing designs. Web design today is developing rapidly, breaking the limitations of conventional approaches and exploring the possibilites of upcoming technologies. Designers are not only experimenting with new techniques and design approaches, but they are improving the quality of their designs in both technical and conceptual respects. Modern websites have great strengths, such as flexibility, cross-browser compatibility and personalization, but they are also becoming increasingly simple and intuitive. This is being done through the application of subtle usability enhancements, drawn either from the Web itself or from offline interactive systems. The Web today is increasingly complex, while usage of the Web is becoming increasingly simple. In this article, we’ll explore some new design approaches and techniques that you may want to develop for your own projects. We’ll present rather unusual or unconventional design approaches and try to understand what’s actually interesting about them and how we can apply them to modern Web design. More specifically, we will discuss the following: real-life metaphors that are applied to the Web, hidden complexity, subtle interactivity, context-sensitive navigation and rapid CSS3 adaptation. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 Help Cheat Sheets (PDF)

Today we are glad to release two useful cheat sheets that will help you quickly look up the right CSS 2.1-property or an obscure CSS 3 property. The style sheets contain most important properties, explanations and keywords for each property. The CSS 2.1 Help Sheet covers Syntax, Font, Text, Margins, Padding, Border, Position, Background, List, Media Types and Keywords. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Women In Web Design: Group Interview

A couple of weeks ago we published the article Expert Advice for Students and Young Web Designers, in which we presented a group interview with professional designers and developers. We tried to find answers to questions that are particularly useful and interesting for those just starting to design websites for a living or considering diving into the Web design industry. In the comments to that article, many readers wished we’d invited more female designers on the panel — in particular because, “There is no way of discerning how the experience of a female designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation.” So, we decided to prepare an article featuring specifically professional women designers giving their expert advice for young Web designers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Helpful Typography Tools And Resources

We love beautiful typography, and we appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools or who just share their knowledge with fellow designers. We are always looking for such resources. We compile them, carefully select the best ones and then prepare them for our round-ups. And now it’s time to present a beautiful fresh dose of typography-related resources. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Useful jQuery Techniques and Plugins

Over the last year, Smashing Magazine has evolved. We’ve been publishing fewer lists and more in-depth articles about design and Web development. We have invited professionals and high-profile developers to write for us. We’ve been investing more resources in the quality and relevance of our articles. We’ve also explored new formats; and on weekends we’ve been publishing more inspirational pieces, leaving the in-depth articles to weekdays. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

750 Web Designer Icons [Freebie]

There are thousands of free icon sets out there, and every other day we see new sets being released by the design community. In fact, Smashing Magazine has been releasing icon sets for years now, too. But today’s release is a bit different. [Links checked & repaired March/06/2017] Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Imperial Porcelain: Free Icon Set

Today we are glad to release Imperial Porcelain Icons Set, a set with 5 beautiful original icons in .png (160×160px). This set was designed by Roman Khramov and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It can be used in various settings — for instance, on hotel and restaurant websites, in e-commerce-sites or even on food-related blogs. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Stunning Free High-Quality Icon Sets

Today we are glad to provide our readers with a yet another round-up of high-quality icon sets that perfectly suit this time of year. Below, you will find free sets covering a wide range of subjects. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the icons, and feel free to follow the links: they will certainly come in handy when you’re designing a new website or looking for inspiration. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

45 Fresh Useful JavaScript and jQuery Techniques and Tools

Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

60 Live-Saving Medical Icons [Freebie]

This set was designed by the user interface design agency Centigrade and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons can serve as great in-app icons for desktop or RIAs in the medical domain. With perspective and reflective effects these can be a real stunner on landing pages or in touch screen application menus. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Photoshop Shortcut Keys Cheat Sheet [PDF]

Over the last months we released a variety of icon sets, tools and templates, but now we would like to release something a bit different for a change. In this post we are glad to release Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts, a PDF-file with a handy overview of most useful keyboard shortcuts available in Adobe Photoshop. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Cool Javascript Examples And CSS3 Tricks

CSS3 is coming. Although the browser support of CSS 3 is still very limited, many designers across the globe experiment with new powerful features of the language, using graceful degradation for users with older browsers and using the new possibilites of CSS3 for users with modern browsers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Highlights 2009

2009 was a very successful year for Smashing Magazine. It was a year of ambitious goals and an intense time schedule, which brought many changes over the past year. In 2009 we published more posts than ever (on average, 8 posts per week). We broadened our areas of interest: for instance, we explored freelancing and the business side of web development, but also tackled user interface design and mobile web design. We also discovered new formats, such as the “Global Web Design” series and Q&A-Sessions — unfortunately, the latter (the Ask SM series with Chris Coyier) lasted only a couple of months. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Yummy! Free Food and Cakes Icon Set

Today we are glad to release something extremely tasty — Yummy Icon Set, a set with 20 beautiful, original and sweet icons in resolutions 48×48px – 128×128px and formats .png, .ico, .incs and .tif. Also, the vector source (.eps) is available for free download as well. This set was designed by our friends Iconeden and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Beautiful Free Icon Sets For Your Next Design

Round-ups of beautiful and useful icons are almost legendary here, on Smashing Magazine. While some readers complain about the annoying “list”-style of some of our articles, we are confident that useful round-ups of relevant resources are very valuable and useful for designers. This is why over months we collect useful links and then present them in posts in the magazine. Like it or hate it, but the feedback that we get from the design community when we publish such posts is mostly positive which is why we keep doing it. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Christmas Icon Set [Freebie]

Christmas is coming and, of course, it’s just the right time to provide you with some nice freebies to fresh up your designs. To celebrate the holidays, our friends from IconEden designed “Smashing Christmas”, a free icon set, dedicated to the design community and released especially for Smashing Magazine’s readers. The set contains 39 beautiful, well-crafted icons with warm and welcoming color scheme. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

The Death Of The Blog Post

Let’s face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

20 Free High Quality Playful Fonts

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Useful New jQuery Techniques and Tutorials

The simplicity, advanced features and strong support are common arguments for developers preferring jQuery against other JavaScript-frameworks. In fact, jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with powerful tools that can significantly improve the user’s interaction with Web applications. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Android GUI PSD Vector Kit

In this post we release Android GUI Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as different interface options for Android GUI. This set was designed by Pavel Maček and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. In this selection we’re glad to present you Calluna, Andika Basic, Mentone, Sovereign Regular, Medio, Tiresias Infopoint and many other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 New Beautiful Blog Designs

There are things that can’t be showcased too often. For instance, beautiful blog designs. We have presented hundreds of beautiful blog designs in the past and now it’s time to provide our readers with a fresh portion of tasty design inspiration. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

CSS3 Cheat Sheet (PDF)

Just last week we released an extensive printable HTML 5 Cheat Sheet that lists all currently supported HTML 5 tags, their descriptions, their attributes and their support in HTML 4. In comments to this post we received many requests for a similar CSS 3 cheat sheet that would present the main features of CSS 3 in a handy, printable reference card. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

HTML5 Cheat Sheet [PDF] Free Download

XHTML 2 is dead, long live HTML5! According to W3C News Archive, XHTML 2 working group is expected to stop work end of 2009 and W3C is planning to increase resources on HTML5 instead. And even although HTML 5 won’t be completely supported until 2022 (yes, 2022), it doesn’t mean that it won’t be widely adopted within the foreseeable future. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. In this selection we’re glad to present you Chunk, Titilium, Amputa Bangiz, Serif Beta, Quatro, Rough Draft, Comfortaa and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time. * 15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts * 40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design * You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

6 Free PSD/(X)HTML-Templates

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day. A couple of weeks ago we released DelliStore, a professional CSS/(X)HTML-template with PSD-sources. In the poll and in the comments to this post our readers asked for more (X)HTML/CSS-template, so here are 6 more professional template that you can use without any restriction for your private or commerical projects. The template were designed by Templateworld and released for free especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Flavour Extended: The Ultimate Icon Set For Web Designers

A couple of months ago we released the beautiful Flavours Icon set that was designed by Oliver Twardowski, a graphic designer from Bonn, Germany, the set aimed to help designers in their Web and user interface designs, containing 177 icons in a resolution of 48×48 pixels. In this post we release the updated version of the icon set, now with 452 icons, freely available to use in private or commercial projects. The files are transparent PNGs, and the source file (.psd) is available for download as well (see the links below). As always, the set is completely free and may be used for any private or commercial project without any restrictions whatsoever. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

15 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. In this selection we’re glad to present you Junction, Nadia Serif, Nilland, CartoGothic Std, Bergamo Std, Comic Serif, Birra Stout, Vegur and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time. * 15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts * 40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design * You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

DelliStore: A Free Professional CSS/XHTML/PSD-Template

Over the last months we’ve heard numerous complaints about the lack of quality in our freebie releases. We are aware that our readers have high expectations and we try to do our best to meet them in our posts. In this post we release a beautiful high-quality (X)HTML/CSS-template (including its PSD-source) that will hopefully meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Acorn Icon Set For Free Download

In this post and in the previous one we release two beautiful professional icon sets that will hopefully meet your expectations and will come in handy in your projects. This icon set was designed by Monica Corduneanu and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set contains 17 beautiful icons-illustrations: an envelope, book, home, laidy and the tramp, magnifying glass, mister, mister and misses, newspaper, paperclip, pencil, rain, the French, the gangster, the kids, the reader, twins and, of course, the Smashing addict. You can find more excellent freebies in our site section Freebies. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Free Photoshop Brushes: Watercolor, Space, Canvas

Over the last months we focused on releases of icons and themes, so we thought that it may be useful to release Photoshop brushes and vector graphics for a change. Hence, in this post we release a set of Photoshop brushes for space effects, a set of brushes to simulate the effect of a painted canvas, a hand-drawn vector illustration set and a Moleskine icon set. You can use the sets (except the bonus set) for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

New Smashing Freebies For Designers and Bloggers

As you may or may not know, we love to smash freebies around. Today we are glad to release the Web Developer icons set, designed by Pedja Rusic, a WP Smashing WordPress theme, designed by Greg Johnson and a Cafe icon set, designed by Enk. All icons and the theme are available for free download and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. Please feel free to suggest ideas for next icon sets or single icons in the comments to this post. We have noticed Pedja Rusic from Serbia over a year ago, when we presented his icon sets in our free icons round-up. A while ago we contacted him and commissioned the design of icons dedicated to designers and developers. The icons should pay close attention to the smallest details, look original, cool and still remain recognizable. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

35 Truly Stunning, Beautiful And Unusual Pictures

We love beautiful photography. In photos, the beauty isn’t necessarily reflected in an eye-catching combination of colors; perspectives, angle, composition and, most importantly, the idea behind the shot or the situation in which the shot was taken, are particularly important when it comes for our showcases. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Retro Icon Set

Over the last few months, we have extensively covered the influence of retro and vintage style on modern Web design. We have looked at recent vintage Web designs, showcased posters and typography and presented vintage tutorials. In fact, we are confident that vintage is still in, and that many designers are experimenting with this style to achieve unusual, creative and (hopefully) effective results. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Really Cute Twitter Icons: Tweeters & Birdies

We continue to deliver fresh high-quality freebies to our readers and we continue to pursue the diversity of subjects that we are going to cover on Smashing Magazine. From the beginning of the year each icon set is supposed to be dedicated to some specific theme or topic that may turn out to be useful for your next project. Today we are releasing 2 free high-quality icon sets. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Magazine Comic Strip: Episode 1

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Cartoons and Comic Strip Art and, to be honest, there was a good reason why we took some time to research on this topic. The truth is that we are pretty tired of the same kind of content appearing in the Web over and over and over again. During our winter break in December we came up with some new ideas, concepts, formats and projects that we will try to achieve with Smashing Magazine in 2009. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

3 Heavenly Christmas Icon Sets [Freebie]

In December we asked few designers to come up with some creative, beautiful, memorable yet usable icon sets. Some designers had a tight schedule and couldn’t get work done in time, but three designers agreed and delviered their high-quality Christmas icon sets — right in time before the deadline. In this post we are glad to release three beautiful high-quality Christmas icon sets — you can use them for free without any restrictions whatsoever. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

22 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

We love useful stuff. For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative CSS tools and related resources. We have been contacting developers, encouraging them to improve their tools and release their handy little apps to the public. Last year we prepared and published some of them in a series of smashing posts about CSS. Now again is the time to give these tools the attention they deserve. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

iPhone PSD Vector Kit

In this post we release the iPhone Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as six different interface options for iPhone. This pack may be useful for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups to clients or to work out ideas. This set was designed by Renee Rist especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Retro and Vintage In Modern Web Design

Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying “old-style” elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different. As a matter of fact, if executed carefully, such designs almost never look boring, although one might intuitively think that the opposite would be the case. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Practika: A Free Icon Set

Today we are glad to release Practika: a free set of 11 practical and useful high-quality icons, designed by DryIcons, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are available in resolutions 64×64px, 128×128px and 256×256px, in 32-bit transparency PNG. These icons can be used for a variety of purposes — in particular, in portfolios and in corporate designs. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Free Fonts Myndraine, Museo Sans

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Tribute To Graffiti Art: 50 Beautiful Street Artworks

Street culture and graffiti are well-known for being provocative, appealing, bold and uncompromising. Originally used by gangs to mark their territory in some urban area, graffitis have now become a rich medium for unrestricted expression of ideas and statements. In fact, creative designers and artists across the globe use this form of art to deliver their message and showcase their work. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box

Over the last months we have seen a strong trend towards more individual web designs. These designs often use realistic motifs from our regular life as visuals. However, apart from visual design elements one can also get creative with the layout of the site – its structure and the way the information is presented and communicated. To provide you with some ideas of how exactly it can be done, we have collected examples of creative design layouts. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers

Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them. Being busy with our own projects, we sometimes try to grasp the intuition behind (probably) complex and cluttered code of other designers to understand how they manage to implement particular design ideas. In fact, by just observing the code of other developers we can learn a lot from them; we can find interesting ideas and improve the quality of our work. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Pop Art Is Alive: Classics and Modern Artworks

As a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s, pop art aims to emphasize the nature of things popular in our daily routine. In pop art, most artists use mechanical means of rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist. Being an art movement, it has some expressive attributes other styles do not possess. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Let There Be Light: Light Paintings and Sculptures

Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Georgeous Nature Wallpapers

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Table of Contents: Creative Examples

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Creative Calendar Designs

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. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful Brochures and Booklets

In corporate design brochures and booklets are a standard tool for promotion and advertising. They are tiny books or magazines which lay around in conference halls, offices and waiting rooms. Sometimes they contain an annual report of the company or showcase the portfolio of an artist. Brochures can also be included in CDs and DVDs; however, usually they are given away as freebies (e.g. they may contain a calendar or some poster inside). Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful Black and White Photography

If you’ve been following Smashing Magazine for a while, you know that almost all posts from the Monday Inspiration series are pretty colorful and eye-catching. This post is an exception. Compared to colorful designs where catchy colors help the design to stand out, in black-and-white designs the ability to stand out depends only on its ability to communicate rather than on its appealing visual presentation. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful and Expressive Packaging Design

Packaging design has the primary goal to attract customers’ attention. For this purpose, package designs can not simply inform the customers, but also provoke feelings and communicate emotions. An effective packaging looks attractive, impresses with its creativity and is just nice to have on the shelf. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs

Effective web design doesn’t have to be pretty and colorful — it has to be clear and intuitive; in fact, we have analyzed the principles of effective design in our previous posts. However, how can you achieve a clear and intuitive design solution? Well, there are a number of options — for instance, you can use grids, you can prefer the simplest solutions or you can focus on usability. However, in each of these cases you need to make sure your visitors have some natural sense of order, harmony, balance and comfort. And this is exactly where the so-called Divine proportion becomes important. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Successful product design manages to reveal useful functionality beyond its appealing form. No matter how excellent a design looks like, most customers aren’t likely to spend money on something they won’t be able to use. On the other hand, most people are likely to buy something useful despite the design it has. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Professional Icon Packs For Free Download

When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online. In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Sexy, Bold And Experimental Typography

Sometimes typography is all you need to communicate your ideas effectively. Graphics can support the type or type can support the graphics, but to deliver the message precisely, you need to make sure your type is expressive enough, your design is distinctive enough and the composition is strong enough. The results are sometimes crazy, sometimes artsy, sometimes beautiful, but often just different from things we’re used to. Thus designers explore new horizons and we explore new viewing perspectives which is what inspiration is all about. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides

Once your latest project is finished, you are very likely to forget the structure of the project’s layout, with all its numerous classes, color schemes and type setting. To understand your code years after you’ve written it you need to make use of sensible code structuring. The latter can dramatically reduce complexity, improve code management and consequently simplify maintainability. However, how can you achieve sensible structuring? Well, there are a number of options. For instance, you can make use of comments — after all, there is always some area for useful hints, notes and, well, comments you can use afterwards, after the project has been deployed. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos

Photography is a very powerful medium and a very difficult craft. Excellent photos don’t only display some facts — they tell stories, awake feelings and manage to share with the audience the emotions a photographer experienced when clicking the shot button. Taking excellent pictures is damn hard as you need to find a perfect perspective and consider the perfect timing. To achieve brilliant photography you need practice and patience. However, it is worth it: the results can be truly stunning. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Five More Principles Of Effective Web Design

Web design has significantly improved over the last years. It’s more user-friendly and more appealing today — and there is a good reason behind it: over the years we’ve found out that design with focus on usability and user experience is just more effective. Modern cut-edge design isn’t filled with loud happy talk and blinking advertisements. We’ve learnt to initiate the dialogue with visitors, involve them into discussions and gain their trust by addressing their needs and speaking with them honestly and directly. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Celebration Of Vintage and Retro Design

Retro and vintage designs are often considered as being outdated, looking old, unattractive and dull. That’s not true. Although compared to modern design, retro is mostly a completely different realm, it has a large variety of benefits modern graphic designers often tend to overlook. And that’s a pity. Because we, as designers, can learn a lot from it. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks

Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Beautiful Handwriting Styles, Lettering and Calligraphy

Handwriting seems to have lost some of its attraction over the last years. Nobody writes beautiful handwritten letters, and uses digital means of communication with smileys, abbreviations and standard lettering instead. And that’s a pity. Since handwriting is unique, it has a tremendous expressive power a standard lettering isn’t able to achieve. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Slick Laptop Designs and Concepts

Laptop design doesn’t have to be boring. Although often laptops look exactly as we expect them to look like, there is a number of design solutions and approaches which are completely different — unusual, creative, beautiful and damn useful. In fact, over the last years designers came up with a number of interesting concepts which have somehow stuck between the prototyping stage and the production stage. Nevertheless, much is possible. And this post is supposed to prove this point. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

60 Brilliant Corporate Fonts

Typography is more than being legible and looking good. Among other things, effective typography manages to achieve two important objectives: a) to create an appropriate atmosphere and enable users to develop trust toward the site and b) to make sure visitors get the main message of the site and (if possible) become interested in the services offered on the site. Since written text is the most efficient instrument to communicate with visitors precisely and directly, the power of typography shouldn’t be underestimated. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Laptop Sleeves, Skins and Stickers

Sometimes laptop is more than just a device. Using laptops over years, some of us tend to develop a genuine affection toward their little (or not so little) companions. We take care of them, putting them in a nice hand-made fabric, spicing them up with some fancy outfit and providing them with a personality using laptop skins. That’s not as bad as it sounds, and there are many ways to use laptop decoration (or laptops decorated by other people) as a source of inspiration. In some way you may also call it laptop art. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

35 Fantastic HDR Images

Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. In graphics HDR imaging is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples

Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don’t have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Breathtaking Typographic Posters

You can’t design without type. However, yon can use only type (or mostly only type) to create breath-taking designs. In fact, many graphic designers and artists take exactly this route to communicate their ideas through their works. The results are sometimes crazy, sometimes artsy, sometimes beautiful, but often just different from things we’re used to. Thus designers explore new horizons and we explore new viewing perspectives which is what inspiration is all about. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

25 Mind-Blowing Gadgets

Few weeks ago we’ve presented a number of innovative gadgets, devices, designs and concepts. Unless explicitly specified, none of them has been officially released or produced yet, and none of them is currently available for end-users. But what about existing products? What about innovative designs which are already available in stores and can be bought straight away? Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Award-Winning Newspaper Designs

Print and Web are different. Traditional layout techniques from print, particularly an advanced formatting, aren’t applicable to the Web as CSS doesn’t offer sophisticated instruments to design such layouts (e.g. text floating around an embedded image; some “floating” techniques provide such results, however they produce bloated source code just as well). Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

15 Stunning Cutting-Edge Gadgets and Technologies

We live in a spectacular time. The pace of technology steadily increases, new fields of science are heavily explored and innovative concepts emerge almost every day, resulting in stunning and overwhelming products. The impact of these products can be tremendous: in fact, new technology can completely revolutionize the way we play, communicate, work and live our lives. Some of these products are just eye-candy, some are useful, some are visionary and some may become revolutionary in the next years. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

29 Cool Music Videos

Music has always been an excellent source of inspiration. Particularly if you are stuck with some problem you can’t find a workaround for, a beautiful song can give you a new perspective, let you see the problem from a different angle. And sometimes it’s just useful to make a break — for instance, watching some music videos. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Data Visualization and Infographics

The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectivelty. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often tend to discard the balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve its main purpose — communicate information. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Innovative Designs and Devices

Steve Jobs stated once that the “design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” While this statement has proven to be crucial over thousands of years, one shouldn’t misinterpret it by emphasizing the functionality despite the design. When it comes to product design, the significance of aesthetics of a given device, the way its design looks and feels, determines the choice of the customer once the functionalities of multiple devices are more or less similar. If supported by sound user interface and a well-tested, clean implementation, innovative design solutions can drastically enhance the user experience. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smashing Magazine’s Publishing Policy

The Smashing Magazine editorial team does not publish articles arbitrarily. We follow a strict set of rules and guidelines. Every article published on Smashing Magazine fulfills certain criteria: quality of content is important to us, and our job is to advocate for and protect the interests of our readers and the design community. Every article is reviewed by at least two independent experts before it gets published on Smashing Magazine. In order for the article to get published, it has to receive at least two positive reviews. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Creative Workplaces

Your workplace and the atmosphere surrounding you determine the way you work and explore your imagination. The more inspirational your workplace is, the easier it is to break the creativity block and discover new ideas. And apparently there is a number of things you can do to improve your personal workflow. As a part of our Monday Inspiration series we present a dozen of creative and unusual workplaces; in the end of the post you’ll also find references to related resources, among them office design galleries and Flickr pools. They can serve as an inspiration once you’ve decided to spice up your work environment. You can also click on the images — they lead to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professonal Design

The importance of typography in design can’t be overestimated. The accuracy, precision and balance of geometric forms can give letters the elegance and sharpness they deserve. Besides, elegant fonts can help to convey the message in a more convenient way. In fact, while there are many excellent professional fonts there are literally thousands of free low-quality fonts which you would never use for professional designs. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices

Compared to conventional navigation patterns tag clouds don’t necessarily offer a more convenient and intuitive navigation. However, used properly, they can provide visitors with an instant illustration of the main topics, giving a very specific and precise orientation of the site’s content. Since human beings tend to think in concepts and models, it’s easier to get an idea of presented content if the main concepts are given straight away — in digestible pieces, and prioritized by their weight. In fact, the main advantage of tag clouds lies in their ability to highlight the most important or/and popular subjects dynamically which is not the case in conventional navigation menus. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

You don’t have to agree upon everything. As a professional web developer you are the advocate of your visitors’ interests and needs; you have to protect your understanding of good user experience and make sure the visitors will find their way through (possibly) complex site architecture. And this means that you need to be able to protect your position and communicate your ideas effectively — in discussions with your clients and colleagues. In fact, it’s your job to compromise wrong ideas and misleading concepts instead of following them blindly. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

50 Web Designers x 6 Questions

Some months ago we’ve selected 50 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers. 35 designers have responded then. For each of 5 questions we’ve received 5 precise answers. The result was 35x5 professional ideas from some of the leading web-developers all around the world. Good news — planning the celebration of our 1st anniversary, we’ve decided to do some more math. We’ve selected 6 questions, which main purpose was to give fellows designers more insights in practice, and in the experience prominent designers gained during their work over the last 5-10 years. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

80 Beautiful Professional Fonts

Every now and again designers stumble upon the very same problem: the choice of a unique and beautiful typeface which manages to fulfill three basic tasks. Support the corporate identity, enrich the visual appearance and is compatible with the overall design. However, usually there are simply too many options you can consider, which is why you need time to find the option you are most comfortable with. Although the choice usually depends on clients’ requirements, it is necessary to have some pretty starting points for your font decision. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup. We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Microformats: What They Are and How To Use Them

Web 2.0 has its positive and its negative sides. Apart from tremendous technological improvements, provided by Ajax, semantically organized content and the growing popularity of RSS-Feeds, the term “Web 2.0” still hadn’t managed to assert itself as the renewed Web rather than a new revolutionary technology as it is mistakenly being called. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know

The concept of floats is probably one of the most unintuitive concepts in CSS. Floats are often misunderstood and blamed for floating all the context around it, causing readability and usability problems. However, the reason for these problems isn’t the theory itself, but the way the theory is interpreted - by developers and browsers. Still, if you take a closer look at the float theory, you’ll find out out that it isn’t that complex as it appears to be. Most related problems are caused by the older versions of (take a guess) Internet Explorer. If you know the bugs, you can control the way information is presented in a more sophisticated, profound way. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

35 Designers x 5 Questions

35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world. In March we’ve selected over 35 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers. Here on Smashing Magazine. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Designing With Grid-Based Approach

The main idea behind grid-based designs is a solid visual and structural balance of web-sites you can create with them. Sophisticated layout structures offer more flexibility and enhance the visual experience of visitors. In fact, users can easier follow the consistency of the page, while developers can update the layout in a well thought-out, consistent way. However, it’s quite hard to find your way through all the theory behind grid systems: it isn’t easy at all. Some important notions and related key-facts can help to learn basics and keep essential techniques in mind. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is. Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. Thanks to all developers who contributed to accessible and usable css-based design over the last few years. We really appreciate it. Thanks! You might want to take a look at the article Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Preventing Spam: Bulletproof Solutions

Spam is probably one of the most difficult problems we have to deal with. E-Mail-filters, such as those used in GMail, provide accurate results, but not every company is willing to use extern services for its private mails. The problem occurs when web-developers have to display e-mail-addresses on a web-page. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking

You’d like to improve the link popularity of your site. Or maybe to keep track on the latest web buzz. It would be nice to inform your readers about it the minute the news occured. Or maybe you just want to monitor the activities of your users and be able to find the best topics they might be interested in - quickly and efficiently. In these cases tracking tools can be extremely useful and improve your search enormously. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Diagrams: Tools and Tutorials

Being a web developer means not only being able to design websites or program their functionality. Sometimes it also means to be able to explain complex issues clearly and be able to present reasonable and convincing arguments. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Become A Smashing Editor

At Smashing Magazine we cover a very broad range of subjects. To be able to do this we rely on people taking on editorial roles within their subject of expertise, helping the Editor in Chief to ensure that articles are useful, and accurate. Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklists (Digital)

Every UI component, no matter if it’s an accordion, a hamburger navigation, a data table, or a carousel, brings along its unique challenges. Inventing a new solution to every problem takes time, and very often it’s really not necessary. We can rely on smart design patterns and ask the right questions ahead of time to avoid issues down the line.

Meet Interface Design Patterns Checklists, a deck of 166 cards with common questions to ask when tackling a common interface challenge — carousel, table, date picker, autocomplete, filtering, search, configurator, slider, timeline, map, web forms, testimonials, onboarding, pricing plan, authentication and many others. Created to help us all keep track of the things we need to consider to design better interfaces, faster. Check the preview (PDF, 825KB).

Read more…

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Writing A Smashing Article

Smashing Magazine authors are typically web designers and developers just like Smashing readers! We want our writers to share the tips and tricks they have learned, and we will give you plenty of help along the way. If you have an idea to share, here is how to turn it into a Smashing article. Read more…