Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: January 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?

This post fea­tures 35 free desk­top wall­pa­pers, cre­ated by design­ers across the globe. Both ver­sions with a cal­en­dar and with­out a cal­en­dar can be down­loaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the pre­view of the wallpaper;
• you can fea­ture your work in our mag­a­zine by tak­ing part in our desk­top wall­pa­per cal­en­dar series. We are reg­u­larly look­ing for cre­ative design­ers and artists to be fea­tured on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. Are you one of them?

So what wall­pa­pers have we received for Jan­u­ary 2010?

New Year Inspiration

“Essen­tial tools for the new year! Have a great year!” Designed by Phidev Inc. from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1920×1440
• with­out cal­en­dar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1920×1440

A Fresh Beginning

“One bleak morn­ing, a girl sits on a dead tree. She feels sad but tried to put a smile on her lips. Sud­denly three glit­ter­ing but­ter­flies went out from the branches and the world begins anew. The girl whis­pered, to the earth, ìthank you for a fresh begin­ning.î At that moment the sun begins to shine on the east.” Designed by April Joy E. Jas­min from Philippines.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Paper flower

“Col­or­ful design made in illus­tra­tor and retouched in pho­to­shop.” Designed by Guillermo Man­tilla from Mexico.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050

New Begin­nings

“A new year means, well….new? So that’s why I wanted to try some­thing new. I have always loved the vec­tor art I find all the inter­net and finally decided its about time to prove to myself that I can do that too. This piece is all about feel­ing, sub­con­scious and con­scious. I can’t believe how the slight­est change in the curves or col­ors affected my sense of flow and for that rea­son I spent an unbe­liev­able amount of time per­fect­ing the flow of the piece ever so metic­u­lously. Here’s to going from an old 2009 (red) to a fresh 2010 (blue).” Designed by Saidur Hos­sain from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

2010 in Style

“2010 Cel­e­bra­tion with lots of friends. I hope you all have a won­der­ful 2010!” Designed by Sasha Bell from Eng­land, UK.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

It’s Snow

“Jan­u­ary is a month of long nights, child­hood sto­ries, hot tea, cozy fire­places and cook­ies with milk. I’d like to share this spirit in my image.” Designed by Inna Ogando from Portugal.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Col­or­full

“Hap­pi­ness and col­ors.” Designed by FranÁois Lep­roust aka MrRayures from France.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Towards Growth

“This is a hope for bet­ter year 2010.” Designed by FahadQue from Pakistan.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

2010

Designed by Sven John­son at Mod­ern Post­card from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Mul­ti­lin­gual Typo­graphic Calendar

“The let­ters say “Happy New Year” in sev­eral lan­guages. More­over, I wanted to send out a mes­sage to all nations about the sev­eral uni­ver­sal prob­lems which need to be addressed effec­tively in order to make this world a per­fect place to live in.” Designed by Abdus Salam from Pakistan.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1920×1200

Seeds

“Exper­i­men­tal piece meant to show growth and rea­son to flour­ish.” Designed by Umer Tahir from Canada.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Friendly

“Lately I’ve been cap­ti­vated by this very naive style of draw­ing; very cartoon-​​like. Although, it may be because that’s the limit of my draw­ing abil­ity. But I’m proud of it, any­way! Inspired by car­toons and beau­ti­ful, bright colours.” Designed by Eli Bur­ford from Australia.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Cool bulb’s

“We wish you a lot of cool ideas in 2010. 3D Mod­el­ing ren­dered with Cin­ema 4D.” Designed by Han­sjo­erg Schnei­der from Switzerland.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1440×1080, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1440×1080, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Scary­Jan­u­ary

Designed by Marta Miazek from Poland.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200

Ice Flow­ers

“I took some pho­tos dur­ing a very frosty and cold week before Christmas.And with one of those decided to make a Jan­u­ary wall­pa­per ” Designed by Anca Varsan­dan from Romania.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Sacred Island

“Inspired by an avatar movie, float­ing island and dragon, happy new year every­one” Designed by Auliya Rah­man from Indonesia.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×1024
• with­out cal­en­dar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×1024

Wish You Were Here

“Pic­tur­ing where I would rather be than in front of my com­puter.” Designed by Valerie Mor­gan from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600

New Year Bal­loon Festival

“The tra­di­tional bal­loon fes­ti­val brings in the new year!” Designed by Chris Alexan­der (Yipori) from England.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440
• with­out cal­en­dar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440

Party Ani­mals

“The wall­pa­per is like water­color paint effect of for­est with ani­mals along with Jan­u­ary 2010 cal­en­dar. The wall­pa­per cal­en­dar depicts party ani­mals wish­ing viewer on new year.” Designed by Jayan­thi from India.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900

Sexy new year

“I wish you a Sexy New Year!” Designed by Nick Voronin from Ukraine.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

New Year Party

“Wow, I’ve finally made it! It’s new year, and I want to cel­e­brate it with my Illus­tra­tion. So, happy new year guys!” Designed by Adrian Wildandyawan from Indonesia.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Lifestyle Adjust­ment

“I designed this wall­pa­per for inspi­ra­tion and encour­age­ment for one of the best years of life ever.” Designed by Mil­li­cent Bow­man from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 480×320, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×768, 1280×800, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 480×320, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×768, 1280×800, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Inspire

Designed by Valentin Bozhilov.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Online Snow­ball Fight

“It’s win­ter­time here at thunder::tech, and we’re gear­ing up for a snow­ball fight! You’ve been in snow­ball fights before, but never like this—you can throw snow­balls at your friends but you’ll never touch a flake of snow or go out­side in the freez­ing cold! Enjoy this lit­tle piece of won­der­land, com­plete with winter-​​themed ani­mals and abom­inable snow­men!” Designed by tech from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Create/​Destroy

Designed by Valerie Mor­gan from USA.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600

Snow­board Sea­son 2010

Designed by Davide Vic­ar­i­otto from Italy.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Snow in January

“A snow that will not fall in my city gave me an inspi­ra­tion for mak­ing this wall­pa­per” Designed by Kle­ment Grgić from Croatia.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×640, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×640, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900

Dutch Win­ter

Designed by Pietje Pre­cies from The Netherlands.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

A deer with a bird

“Illus­trated desk­top shows an idilic win­ter scene. A deer and a bird are telling us a story about frend­ship in unpleasent cir­cum­stances. It is a poetic mes­sage, that makes your desk­top nicer and offers you an inspi­ra­tion.” Designed by Tina Krašovec from Slovenia.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050
• with­out cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050

Extreme Win­ter

Designed by Julio Ortiz Gon­za­lez from Spain.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 800×480, 1024×640, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600
• with­out cal­en­dar: 800×480, 1024×640, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600

Jan­u­ary Sentense

“Just moti­vat­ing sen­tence for Decem­ber ” Designed by Temeshi from Poland.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Happy new year!

“New year wall­pa­per theme” Designed by Umut Isbilir from Turkey.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Egg

“Just an egg to rep­re­sent the new begin­ning this new year.” Designed by Dsaurus from Philippines.

• pre­view
• with cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050
• with­out cal­en­dar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050

Join in next month!

Please notice that we respect the ideas and moti­va­tion behind artists’ work which is why we’ve given artists full free­dom to explore their cre­ativ­ity and express emo­tions and expe­ri­ence through their works. And this is also why the themes of the wall­pa­pers weren’t any­how influ­enced by us, but designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

Thanks to all design­ers for par­tic­i­pa­tion. Join in next month!

What’s your favorite?

What’s your favourite theme or wall­pa­per for this month? Please let us know in the com­ments! And have a smash­ing Jan­u­ary and New Year, folks!

© Smash­ing Edi­to­r­ial for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | 134 com­ments | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: Wall­pa­pers

Posted in Graphic Design | Comments Off

Top Articles On The Web Design Billboard In December’09

A per­fect lay­out, A Good Design and Nice Resource can pro­duce a cre­ative out­put. Lay­out, tex­tures, typog­ra­phy and pat­terns are used more often than one may think but the out­come of dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion can result ver­ity of excel­lent designs. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism is built upon knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence. How­ever, When it comes to selec­tion of right resources you need to be very care­ful and spe­cific about needs.

In this round-​​up, you’ll find num­ber of top resources, tuto­ri­als, free­bies which left deep impres­sion on web design com­mu­nity, as the month of Decem­ber had a lot of inter­est­ing arti­cles pro­duces by dif­fer­ent sources.

The more time and effort you ded­i­cate for use­ful and cre­ative resources, the higher are your chances for get­ting bet­ter results.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing related arti­cles as well.

• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In November’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In October’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In September’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In August’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In July’09
• Cor­po­rate Web­site Designs For Design Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Tutorials, Web Design | Comments Off

Stunning Fireworks Photos

It is a most beau­ti­ful expe­ri­ence — the sounds and col­ors of fire­works in the silence and dark­ness of night. Words alone can­not describe such an expe­ri­ence. The sky comes alive with so many vibrant hues, star­bursts, and show­ers of light along with rib­bons of smoke, mak­ing us happy and awestruck. Pho­tograph­ing fire­works, how­ever, is not an easy task.

To cel­e­brate the beauty of fire­works, we present a show­case of beau­ti­ful fire­works pho­tog­ra­phy. Each image is linked to the orig­i­nal photographer’s page with their pro­file names — so you can view more of their work or even thank them for their con­tri­bu­tion. And finally, remem­ber to have a cam­era handy this com­ing New Year’s Eve!

Beau­ti­ful Pic­tures Of Fireworks

Cit­i­zens Bank Park Fireworks

Dai­lyville

fire­works on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Seat­tle New Year

4^th of July fireworks

heartreef

Fire­works at fes­ti­val in Hella

Blue Explo­sion on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

United King­dom fire­works at the cel­e­bra­tion of light

Daniel Avilés

New Year’s Eve fireworks

4^th of July

Waikiki Fire­works

Japan­ese Fireworks

Fire­works!!!

New Years Eve Syd­ney 2008 Fireworks

Its all about the view

Epcot 2009 2 Fireworks

14 juil­let en couleur

Bridge to Next Island

Fire­works

New trial … View large!!

South Africa Night

The Big Bang (?)

Quincy Fire­works

Mil­ton, VT Fire­works ‘08

Eif­fel Tower

Fire & Sea

Star­burst Frailty

Fire­works at Otsego Lake

Tum­blr

(via hel­looc­sem)

mikein­tokyo

U. Rain

Jeremy Snell

David J. Nightingale

chalee-​​80

Nick Tan

Piero Sierra

brewskiz­zlr

Pas­sion flower

Souvik_​Prometure

Fire­works

Things to keep in mind for your Fire­works pho­tos this year

To make some truly stun­ning fire­works shots, you need keep a cou­ple of things in mind. First, a nor­mal cam­era can’t han­dle such high lev­els of light. Although you’re shoot­ing at night, using your flash won’t make any dif­fer­ence. Also, the light pro­duced by fire­works is more than enough to cap­ture a decent shot. For more dra­matic results, you may choose longer expo­sure. And to ensure a high-​​quality result, always be ready for ini­tial explo­sions when there’s less smoke in the atmosphere.

Other things to keep in mind are to use low ISO, set focal length to infin­ity, use a tri­pod and of course use man­ual mode. Some cam­eras have “Fire­works Mode” which saves you the trou­ble of hav­ing to adjust a lot of dif­fer­ent set­tings. Just set the cam­era to “Fire­works Mode” and you’re ready for action!

And, of course, Happy New Year’s Eve!

© vail­ro­drigues for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | 48 com­ments | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: fire­works, pho­tos

Posted in Graphic Design | Comments Off

Christmas & New Year Special Mega Giveaway: Winners!

A weeks ago, we cre­ated a con­test at inst­ant­Shift called Christ­mas & New Year Spe­cial Mega Give­away had announced the give­away of some of the most famous hard­ware and design related stuff.

We’ve got more than 400 response com­ments. After void­ing spam and non-​​legit com­ments we have left with 240+ valid com­ments. It’s really good to see that how we can able to help in our reader’s life and their profession.

We want to thank you all for such a good response with orig­i­nal & help­ful com­ments and use­ful feed­backs. You can find the all win­ners infor­ma­tion below.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all the win­ners!

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Win­ners

Fol­low­ing 35 Win­ners are selected ran­domly from the com­ments list of Christ­mas Give­away Post. In case, If you missed the give­away, make sure you ready for next one as we going to cre­ate more such give­aways in future.

• 01. Mia Pee­bles – Intuos4 Large Pen Tablet from Wacom
• 02. Jor­dan Lane – Radeon HD 5870 1 GB DDR5 PCI-​​Express Graph­ics Card from Sap­phire




• 03. David Bak – 1 Devel­oper Pack­age Theme from WooThemes
• 04. form­lotse – 1 Devel­oper Pack­age Theme from WooThemes
• 05. Voras – 1 Devel­oper Pack­age Theme from WooThemes
• 06. Wal­ter Ross – 1 Devel­oper Pack­age Theme from WooThemes
• 07. Jared – 1 Devel­oper Pack­age Theme from WooThemes




• 08. fxxy – a One Year Mem­ber­ship from Ele­gant­Themes
• 09. Jônatan Fróes – a One Year Mem­ber­ship from Ele­gant­Themes




• 10. Ward Davis – 1 Free PSD to XHTML /​ CSS con­ver­sion from RapidX­HTML
• 11. Richard Saari – 1 Free PSD to XHTML /​ CSS con­ver­sion from RapidX­HTML
• 12. Angelo Bel­tran – 1 Free PSD to XHTML /​ CSS con­ver­sion from RapidX­HTML
• 13. Emily Schoen – 1 Free PSD to XHTML /​ CSS con­ver­sion from RapidX­HTML
• 14. Krzy­siu – 1 Free PSD to XHTML /​ CSS con­ver­sion from RapidX­HTML




• 15. Gillian – 1 Pre­mium Con­cept from Con­cept­Feed­back
• 16. Tautvy­das – 1 Pre­mium Con­cept from Con­cept­Feed­back
• 17. anna­lene – 1 Pre­mium Con­cept from Con­cept­Feed­back
• 18. lind­say – 1 Pre­mium Con­cept from Con­cept­Feed­back
• 19. Manohar – 1 Pre­mium Con­cept from Con­cept­Feed­back




• 20. ASmaa – 1 Flash XML tem­plate from Flash­Mint
• 21. Enk. – 1 Flash XML tem­plate from Flash­Mint
• 22. Kar­tik – 1 Flash XML tem­plate from Flash­Mint
• 23. idntt – 1 Flash XML tem­plate from Flash­Mint
• 24. agush­ery – 1 Flash XML tem­plate from Flash­Mint




• 25. jona – 1 One Month Pre­mium Account from Graf­pe­dia
• 26. malevi4 – 1 One Month Pre­mium Account from Graf­pe­dia
• 27. Laura – 1 One Month Pre­mium Account from Graf­pe­dia
• 28. Peter Radics – 1 One Month Pre­mium Account from Graf­pe­dia
• 29. Anca G – 1 One Month Pre­mium Account from Graf­pe­dia




• 30. Ger­ald – 1 Copy of 3D Wall from Flashloaded
• 31. Johanna – 1 Copy of 3D Wall from Flashloaded
• 32. Andy M – 1 Copy of 3D Wall from Flashloaded




• 33. Jonathan – 500 free busi­ness cards from Overnight­Prints




• 34. Cindy – 200 Free pack of Busi­ness Cards from Moo
• 35. SechD – 25 Greet­ing Cards from Moo

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all the win­ners! Soon you all going to receive your prizes details in your mailbox.

Thanks again to every­one that par­tic­i­pated in our “Christ­mas & New Year Spe­cial Mega Giveaway”.

 

To get updated about more free­bies sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — more give­aways are planned in the near future.

Offi­cial References!

• Wacom
• Sap­phiretech
• WooThemes
• Ele­gant­Themes
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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.

None of this would have been pos­si­ble with­out the tremen­dous sup­port of our authors, con­trib­u­tors, and edi­to­r­ial staff. We express sin­cere grat­i­tude to them for all the ideas and hard work they’ve put into arti­cles pub­lished here on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. We also want to thank you, the read­ers, for your atten­tion, crit­i­cism, ideas, sug­ges­tions, emails, tweets, and links over the past year. Smash­ing Mag­a­zine is dri­ven by your sup­port which is why we are always lis­ten­ing to you and we truly appre­ci­ate every mes­sage we receive.

We have tried our best to improve the qual­ity of our arti­cles so as to increase their value for design­ers and devel­op­ers. In this post, we’ll review what has hap­pened on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine over the past year: smash­ing high­lights, set­backs, and small sen­sa­tions of 2009 — which we present in a month by month time­line. You can com­pare the high­lights of 2009 with those of 2008 or 2007 (which, by the way, include links to some really use­ful articles).

Jan­u­ary

The year starts with a rather lengthy post 100 (Really) Beau­ti­ful iPhone Wall­pa­pers which actu­ally doesn’t gain a lot of atten­tion in Jan­u­ary, but gains traf­fic sig­nif­i­cantly through­out the year. We start gath­er­ing mate­r­ial for this ulti­mate col­lec­tion of iPhone wall­pa­pers in early Decem­ber and four writ­ers help by select­ing the most use­ful resources and the most beau­ti­ful wallpapers.

By far the most pop­u­lar arti­cle of the month is Web Design Trends For 2009. We care­fully exam­ine what’s hap­pen­ing on the web in 2008 and came up with a cou­ple of trends that we think will appear in the web design land­scape in 2009. Some of our pre­dic­tions turn out to be cor­rect. And yes, we’re already prepar­ing a sim­i­lar post for 2010.

Feb­ru­ary

In Feb­ru­ary, Paul Boag reveals 10 Harsh Truths About Cor­po­rate Web­sites. His arti­cle seems to speak from the heart of thou­sands of design­ers and devel­op­ers. The arti­cle gets pos­i­tive feed­back and we even receive tweets from two cor­po­rate site own­ers who agree to keep the key points of the arti­cle in mind for future redesigns.

Also, Alexan­der Makarov takes a cou­ple of work days off, tests 9 pop­u­lar PHP IDEs, and presents a very detailed review of pop­u­lar PHP IDEs in the arti­cle The Big PHP IDE Test: Why Use One And Which To Choose. He also pre­pares an exten­sive spread­sheet for pub­lic review. An editable ver­sion is avail­able as well (we hope that other devel­op­ers will vol­un­tar­ily add reviews to other IDEs), how­ever we are forced to close edit­ing because of vandalism.

Feb­ru­ary is also a busy month for us and our read­ers. We announce a Hard­ware Give­away with almost 9000 com­ments — more com­ments than Word­Press can han­dle at the time. Newer ver­sions of Word­Press offer com­ment pag­i­na­tion – prob­a­bly added for that rea­son. We also announce the Smash­ing Book — our most impor­tant project in 2009. As you may know, there was a long road lead­ing up to its final release in early December.

March

In March, we get tech­ni­cal. We pub­lish arti­cles related to Ruby On Rails, MySQL, Sub­ver­sion, and PHP. The lat­ter is a first-​​ever rebut­tal of one of our pre­vi­ous arti­cles; it’s writ­ten by PHP gurus Chris Shi­flett and Sean Cotes. They take a closer look at the pre­vi­ously pub­lished arti­cle, explain its errors and reveal what is right and wrong in its the­ory and prac­tice. From this point on, we con­sider get­ting experts to tech­ni­cally review arti­cles before they’re published.

The most pop­u­lar post of the month is 70 New, Use­ful AJAX and JavaScript Tech­niques, pre­pared by Noura Yehia. We get back to our roots, to the good old days when we picked the best cod­ing and design-​​related resources and present them in a well-​​researched round-​​up. Although many peo­ple have crit­i­cized the “list” arti­cle for­mat, most read­ers still find such round-​​ups use­ful, so we con­tinue pub­lish­ing them. Over the course of the year we pushed lists back a bit, try­ing to pub­lish more unique and thought-​​provoking content.

The most con­tro­ver­sial inspi­ra­tional post of the month is def­i­nitely Bizarre Sur­real and Dark Art Pic­tures, pre­pared by Aquil Akhter. The post doesn’t seem to leave any­one unaf­fected; some read­ers hate it, some read­ers love it, and it brings a large spike in traffic.

This month we also announce the Smash­ing Com­mu­nity Icon Set where we ask read­ers what icons they need with plans to design the icons together with a pro­fes­sional icon design agency, then release them for free. Unfor­tu­nately, the win­ner — port­fo­lio icon set — is still not ready (the design agency is work­ing on some nifty fea­tures), but we hope to finally release the set in early 2010.

April

In March we start dis­cussing with Jacob Gube what would be an inter­est­ing twist for April’s Fools Day and we come up with a nice idea. As a result, we pub­lish Jacob Gube’s arti­cle Break­ing: Inter­net Explorer 8.1 Eagle Eyes Leaked. The arti­cle takes a look at the new ver­sion of Inter­net Explorer and claims that it has Mozilla Fire­fox exten­sions sup­port, excel­lent per­for­mance against the Acid 3 test, and a server-​​side code decom­piler. The news spreads across social media and the arti­cle gets a nice traf­fic spike through StumbleUpon.

In April, Rob Mor­ris presents 5 Sim­ple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs. In gen­eral, April turns out to be one of the best months of the year. We pub­lish 47 arti­cles related to very dif­fer­ent top­ics (free­lanc­ing, graph­ics design, typog­ra­phy, CSS, con­ver­sion rates, logo design) and thus man­age to cover a wide vari­ety of top­ics — result­ing in much pos­i­tive feed­back. Many read­ers, how­ever, com­plain that we pub­lish too often, so in the fol­low­ing months we begin to pub­lish at a more mod­er­ate pace.

May

May turns out to be a prac­ti­cal month. We re-​​discover round-​​ups with very use­ful resources. We pub­lish a round-​​up of use­ful glos­saries, the ulti­mate gen­eral guide to indus­try terms that should get our read­ers well on their way to under­stand­ing what web design­ers are talk­ing about. We also dis­cuss ways to put your con­tent in front of more peo­ple.

The most pop­u­lar posts of the month are graf­fiti art­works and Free Word­Press Themes for 2009. Inspi­ra­tional posts work well, but the appetite of our read­ers is grow­ing. Over the com­ing months we begin to see a rise of resis­tance against inspi­ra­tional posts which are labeled “lazy con­tent”. We lis­ten and do our best to improve the qual­ity of inspi­ra­tional posts while reduc­ing the num­ber of such posts and mak­ing room for more prac­ti­cal articles.

June

June turns out to be a time for exper­i­ments. Because we observe a large num­ber of Mac-​​users in our stats, we decide to pub­lish a cou­ple of Mac-​​related posts. We started slowly in May, and con­tin­ued in June with Exposé tips and tweaks for your Mac. How­ever, in the arti­cles we’re not just prais­ing Mac. As it turns out, if you want some traf­fic and dis­cus­sions on your blog, ban­ter Apple, its prod­ucts, or fans. We do it and the arti­cle Why Web Devel­op­ers Don’t Need A Mac gets 655 com­ments. How­ever, focus­ing arti­cles on Mac is not a good idea — the feed­back is very neg­a­tive. After June we focus on more gen­eral design-​​related top­ics and let the Windows-​​Mac debate rest in peace.

The most remark­able posts of the month are Inayaili de Leon’s chal­lenge to take your design to the next level with CSS3 and Gareth Hardy’s dis­cus­sion of com­mon mis­takes in logo design. One of the most use­ful posts of the year is Cameron Chapman’s round-​​up of web design check­lists and ques­tion­naires which per­forms fairly well in terms of traf­fic and user feedback.

In gen­eral, through the first six months of the year, CSS-​​related arti­cles per­form best. We notice this and start look­ing for more pro­fes­sional CSS/​JS-​​developers who have time for writ­ing. We also inten­sify our coop­er­a­tion with our cur­rent writ­ers. The results are seen in the months to come.

July

July is another month with a wide vari­ety of design-​​related top­ics. Our advanced read­ers learn about clever PNG opti­miza­tion tech­niques. The most-​​discussed arti­cle of the month is The Roadmap To Becom­ing A Pro­fes­sional Free­lance Web Designer. We start to get more requests for freelance-​​related top­ics, rang­ing from pric­ing to orga­ni­za­tion to project man­age­ment. We care­fully write down the most promis­ing ideas and assign top­ics to reg­u­lar and new authors.

We try to take our inspi­ra­tional posts to a new level, mak­ing them more exten­sive and less ran­dom. Our first result is Diogo Terror’s arti­cle about Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design. The arti­cle goes to extreme lengths explain­ing var­i­ous tech­niques from the time as well as show­cas­ing beau­ti­ful Swiss style art­works. Unfor­tu­nately, very few read­ers appear to be inter­ested. Although the arti­cle takes a cou­ple weeks to pre­pare, the traf­fic is very low and it gets just 75 comments.

We present the results of our Typo­graphic Lay­out Design Con­test in which we aim to col­lect beau­ti­ful typo­graphic (X)HTML+CSS-based lay­outs cre­ated by the design com­mu­nity and release them for free. The response is over­whelm­ing and we release 45 free typo­graphic (X)HTML/CSS tem­plates. Unfor­tu­nately, this is the last con­test we offer in 2009. But no wor­ries, new con­tests are com­ing in 2010!

August

In August we present the find­ings of our large study of typo­graphic design prac­tices in mod­ern web design. We iden­tify 13 gen­eral typo­graphic prob­lems and issues related to typo­graphic design and present answers to them that we found through our research. Among other things, we dis­cover the most pop­u­lar type­faces, aver­age font sizes, line height, and the num­ber of char­ac­ters per line. The study is extremely time-​​consuming, but we don’t care. The results are very use­ful and that’s what really matters.

We pub­lish a quite con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Design­ers… in which our author Fran­cisco Inchauste explores inspi­ra­tional paint­ings and artists who have influ­enced mod­ern design. The arti­cle gains a lot of atten­tion and insti­gates some rough dis­cus­sions in the com­ments to the post.

We explain how to code your first HTML 5 lay­out and your first iPhone appli­ca­tion. And, of course, we pub­lish prob­a­bly the most bizarre post ever: Unique TV Series Episodes That Inspire Cre­ativ­ity, writ­ten by Louis Lazaris. It’s a review of how par­tic­u­lar TV episodes were dif­fer­ent from what came before, and how this can serve as moti­va­tion for future designs. The arti­cle doesn’t make sense for some read­ers, but most are quite intrigued, which is a good sign.

Sep­tem­ber

Sep­tem­ber starts unpleas­antly for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. We are under siege. Some­one attempts to infil­trate our main server and man­ages to manip­u­late some HTML data. The con­se­quence: a new server (we moved from a clus­ter to the cloud), a new inter­nal secu­rity pol­icy (which still causes some prob­lems for us and appears to be a bit too restric­tive), secure FTP and, of course, more costs.

We need a lit­tle time to recover, but get back on track quite quickly. We fol­low the attack with a few involved, thought-​​provoking arti­cles: in the arti­cle CSS Wish­list: New Ideas, Debates and Solu­tions Kayla Knight dis­cusses the cur­rent state of CSS and describes some alter­na­tive CSS syn­taxes and CSS pro­gram­ming con­cepts as well as already-​​available tech­niques and tools. We reveal pro­fes­sional team man­age­ment tips as well as the find­ings of our port­fo­lio design study.

Many cod­ing arti­cles on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine cover var­i­ous WordPress-​​related tips, tricks and tech­niques. Almost every month we pub­lished at least two arti­cles related to Word­Press; in Sep­tem­ber we pub­lished one of the most pop­u­lar WordPress-​​related posts of the year: How To Inte­grate Face­book With Word­Press, writ­ten by Thiemo Fet­zer. You can bet that we will con­tinue pub­lish­ing more WordPress-​​related arti­cles in 2010.

Also in this month, Jon Tan helps us to cre­ate the Smash­ing Experts Panel: because some arti­cles were incor­rect or con­tained fac­tual errors, we invite experts and pro­fes­sional design­ers and devel­op­ers to do paid reviews of Smash­ing Magazine’s arti­cles before they’re pub­lished. As of this writ­ing, we have over 25 experts in the panel. This turns out to be bit­ter­sweet news for our authors: edit­ing and feed­back now need more time and authors need to be more pre­cise in their articles.

Octo­ber

The last few months of the year are months of big changes for us and for our read­ers. In Octo­ber, for the first time in our young his­tory, we acquire an exist­ing web­site, Noupe​.com, cre­ated in 2007 by the Egypt­ian Blog­ger Noura Yehia. At the moment Noupe has a reg­u­lar pub­lish­ing sched­ule and is updated as fre­quently as Smash­ing Magazine.

In Octo­ber, Louis Lazaris explains CSS Dif­fer­ences in Inter­net Explorer 6, 7 and 8 which is a new for­mat for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. For the first time, we’re pub­lish­ing a use­ful ref­er­ence arti­cle that can be looked up when our read­ers are han­dling browser incon­sis­tency issues. And it works; the arti­cle has 238 com­ments and gains organic traf­fic from search engines. Also, in Octo­ber we start our new series “Global Web Design” in which we fea­ture web devel­op­ers and web designs from dif­fer­ent coun­tries of the world and explore what’s hap­pen­ing in the web design scene world­wide. We start with Russ­ian Web Design. The new series is a suc­cess, so you can expect more excit­ing posts in the series in 2010.

Apart from clas­sic CSS and usabil­ity posts, the month brings many orig­i­nal arti­cles. For instance, Brand = User Expe­ri­ence: The Inter­face of a Cheese­burger. Our read­ers share their excite­ment about the orig­i­nal con­tent and want to see sim­i­lar posts on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine in the future. We lis­ten and start prepar­ing other thought-​​provoking arti­cles in the months to come. And, of course, it was pretty cool to put the image of a tasty cheese­burger on Smash­ing Magazine’s front page. We’re sure no design-​​related blog has done that before!

Impor­tant to us was Smash­ing Magazine’s Redesign and the Smash­ing Net­work. The redesign is done by Liam McKay and his design agency, WeFunc­tion. How­ever, we sub­se­quently tweaked a cou­ple of things in the design (and Liam is still unhappy about these changes). Footer and side­bar illus­tra­tions are designed by Pasquale D’Silva. The idea behind the net­work is to pro­mote high-​​quality con­tent on the Web design scene and to make it worth­while for pub­lish­ers to pro­duce use­ful and inter­est­ing design-​​related arti­cles. We want our com­mu­nity to ben­e­fit from these arti­cles and sup­port the pub­lish­ers with direct traf­fic from Smash­ing Magazine.

Novem­ber

Novem­ber is another impor­tant month for us. Finally, after 3 years of work­ing in dif­fer­ent cities, we move to our first joined office in Freiburg (Ger­many). This is also the rea­son why the rest of the year is a bit hec­tic: there are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of things that had to be con­sid­ered, dis­cussed, and taken care of.

Prob­a­bly the most prac­ti­cal arti­cle of the month is Kat Neville’s post about invoice design. The arti­cle presents some gen­eral guide­lines, best prac­tices and exam­ples that will help you make sure your invoices are up to spec. Some arti­cles need tremen­dous work and vivid dis­cus­sions before they finally get pub­lished. One of these is The Ails Of Typo­graphic Anti-​​Aliasing by Thomas Gian­nat­ta­sio. Can you spot all the hours of work that were put into it?

In Novem­ber we have quite a sur­prise for our read­ers. Together with Paddy Don­nelly, we dis­cuss cre­at­ing a spec­tac­u­lar post that cov­ers a recent trend in mod­ern web design: magazine-​​style blog post designs, or art-​​directed blog posts. Paddy refers to it as a ‘blogazine’. After four weeks of prepa­ra­tion, the arti­cle The death of the bor­ing blog post? finally goes live. The sur­prise is that when a user clicks on the link to the post, he lands on a page which has a lay­out and design that’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the rest of Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. Accord­ing to our stats, many users reloaded the page won­der­ing where the “usual” lay­out had gone.

The arti­cle is one of the best posts of 2009, as it man­ages to spark a huge dis­cus­sion in the design com­mu­nity and gains over 550 com­ments. The read­ers are in dis­agree­ment about the design of the arti­cle, but the idea is inspir­ing and shortly after it’s pub­lished we start to see a cou­ple of emerg­ing new ‘blogazines’.

Decem­ber

Finally. The Smash­ing Book is released. Announced in Feb­ru­ary, and dis­cussed in sev­eral posts through­out the year, in Decem­ber it finally arrives. Actu­ally, you can buy the Smash­ing Book right now, avail­able exclu­sively from Smash­ing Mag­a­zine — all orders are now shipped right away. This one was really hard work and most things didn’t work out as we had planned, but the pos­i­tive reac­tions and impres­sions of our read­ers are def­i­nitely worth it. We see huge involve­ment from our read­ers who post their images, videos, tweets and reviews in social media. Feed­back is over­whelm­ing and users’ expec­ta­tions are high. The com­ing months will show how well we did our job with the book.

Image source

Among other news, in Decem­ber we hire our reg­u­lar writer Cameron Chap­man — she becomes the edi­to­r­ial man­ager on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. Cameron is a pro­fes­sional writer, web– and graphic designer with over 6 years of expe­ri­ence. She will still be writ­ing arti­cles for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, but now she also han­dles com­mu­ni­ca­tion between many of our new and reg­u­lar authors, dis­cussing arti­cle ideas with them.

In terms of con­tent, Decem­ber turns out to be a slow month with less traf­fic and fewer com­ments — appar­ently, our read­ers have other things to take care of. Still, we keep pub­lish­ing use­ful and orig­i­nal con­tent. We explain how you can push your but­tons with CSS3 and sup­port IE and still be cutting-​​edge.

In Decem­ber, we pub­lish the most chal­leng­ing arti­cle of the year: we encour­age our read­ers to design some­thing every day for the next 365 days. We encour­age par­tic­i­pants to tweet each new design along with #daily365 so that every­one will can see the progress of each project. Some design­ers are already par­tic­i­pat­ing! So are you up for the challenge?

What should you expect in 2010?

We’re plan­ning some big changes in the com­ing months. Soon we will release the Smash­ing Net­work Wid­get for your web­site and a mobile ver­sion of Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. Well-​​known authors and experts are cur­rently writ­ing arti­cles for us. You can also expect to see more new team mem­bers and newly released books in coop­er­a­tion with a pub­lish­ing house. Also, the trans­la­tion of the Smash­ing Book to other lan­guages (cur­rently only Korean ver­sion) is being pre­pared. We also have some inter­est­ing plans for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine and the design com­mu­nity, so you bet­ter stay tuned to our updates in 2010.

We’ll do our best to deliver use­ful and inspir­ing high-​​quality arti­cles in the new year. We’ll come up with new ideas to keep Smash­ing Mag­a­zine an excit­ing place. And we’ll be lis­ten­ing to your ideas, sug­ges­tions, com­plaints and crit­i­cism. Have a truly smash­ing, suc­cess­ful, healthy and peace­ful new year in 2010!

What was the most mem­o­rable Smash­ing Mag­a­zine post in 2009?

Your opin­ion has always been very impor­tant to us. Please share your impres­sions about our work over the last year and let us know what you would like to see changed on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine in 2010. Also, what was your most mem­o­rable Smash­ing Magazine’s post in 2009? We’ll do our best to improve Smash­ing Mag­a­zine in the new year!

(ll)

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Post tags: 2009, smash­ing

Posted in Graphic Design | Comments Off

Mix Collection of 88 Stunning Photographs to Refresh Your Mind

When it comes to inspi­ra­tion then there is no lim­i­ta­tion on resources. Pho­tog­ra­phy is one of the key sources of inspi­ra­tion for some of my past work. Here we talk­ing about pho­tog­ra­phy of var­i­ous forms like aer­ial, wildlife, under­wa­ter, por­trait, nature, travel etc. which I find usu­ally amaze me more than any­thing. If you know how to shoot a photo then you can also change some­thing fairly sim­ple to some­thing cre­ative or abstract or oth­er­wise more artis­tic. You don’t need any spe­cial skills for tak­ing such shots. It all depends on the envi­ron­ment and per­fect timing.

There are many ways to attack pho­tog­ra­phy and some are much more expen­sive than oth­ers. Here in this show­case, we pre­sent­ing a Stun­ning col­lec­tion of Pho­tog­ra­phy and Pic­tures taken by var­i­ous artists in which all pic­tures are linked to the author’s pages.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing pho­tog­ra­phy inspi­ra­tion related arti­cles as well.

• 100+ Exam­ples of Bril­liant Tilt-​​Shift Photography
• 88 Exam­ples of Incred­i­ble Aer­ial Photography
• Mix Col­lec­tion of 99 Stun­ning Pho­tographs to Refresh Your Mind
• Enjoy Moments Of Reflec­tive Pho­tog­ra­phy – Part I, Part II
• Rain­bow Col­ors Inspired Pho­tos and Pic­tures – Part I, Part II
• Motion and Blur Pho­tog­ra­phy for Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part II
• Strange and Fan­tas­tic Build­ings Archi­tec­ture – Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to inspi­ra­tion that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Graphic Design, Web Design | Comments Off

How Many Ideas Do You Show Your Clients?

I read some­where that show­ing your client the full range of your cre­ative ideas dur­ing a project is impor­tant, the ratio­nale being that the client is enti­tled to see the ideas com­ing from the cre­ative pro­fes­sional who they have hired and invested in. While this approach has some ben­e­fits, in some cases show­ing too many ideas is counter-​​productive to the nat­ural flow of a project. Proof of how imag­i­na­tive you are can be shown in other ways.

Spoilt For Choice

Sce­nario 1

You look at your Illus­tra­tor paste­board and see half a dozen cool logo ideas… not just cool, but super-​​cool… not just super-​​cool, actu­ally, but prac­ti­cal and appro­pri­ate. You have trans­lated the brief bril­liantly. You feel rather pleased with your­self. How­ever, the last time you showed a client all of your ideas, you got caught up in a dizzy­ing merry-​​go-​​round, forced to mash up parts of one logo with parts of another, using unsuit­able and under-​​baked concepts.

That client was over­whelmed with ideas and unable to choose one or the other: too many direc­tions, and too many good ideas. You offered all your super-​​cool ideas on a plat­ter, con­vinced that you had nailed all pos­si­ble direc­tions. You worked hard to pre-​​empt your clients ques­tions and sug­ges­tions. But with all of this hard work, you unwit­tingly set in motion a series of events that many design­ers before you have experienced.

Putting your client in the posi­tion of a kid in candy store can lead to some of the more frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ences in design work. Are we under­min­ing the flow of a project with our need to have our cre­ative ego stroked by the client?

Too much choice can be a bad thing for clients.

Sce­nario 2

Again, look­ing at your Illus­tra­tor paste­board, you see half a dozen cool logo ideas: super-​​cool, prac­ti­cal and appro­pri­ate, in fact. You have trans­lated the brief bril­liantly, as before.

The client is impressed by your imag­i­na­tion, your inter­pre­ta­tion of the brief and your abil­ity to think out­side the box. They feel embar­rassed — even spoilt — by the choice of amaz­ing ideas; not what they were expect­ing, given their pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences. The client looks at the ideas and real­izes you were the right per­son for the job. They go away to mull over the ideas.

You’re pleased. The client is pleased. Time for a beer.

The client returns with a deci­sive plan of attack. They have picked out one or sev­eral poten­tial win­ners from among your ideas and are keen to walk through tweaks and changes with you. By show­ing the client all of your ideas, whether cool or funky, prac­ti­cal or safe, you have cov­ered all bases, left no room for mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion and accounted for that notion of “sub­jec­tive perceptions.”

As is almost always the case, you have your own favorites, but prior expe­ri­ence has shown that you mustn’t assume the client will feel the same.

Fewer Ideas, Less Choice

We could alter these two sce­nar­ios by chang­ing the “show­ing all ideas” to “show­ing just a few.” The advan­tages would be that the client would not be over­whelmed: you will have pro­vided just a few promis­ing ideas. This way, you are being assertive and con­fi­dent in your abil­ity to inter­pret the brief. You also believe that the client would be hand­i­capped by more choice.

In both cases, the client might be pleased with the ideas you have picked out and your abil­ity to get the job done. You are a cre­ative laser-​​guided mis­sile. You don’t need your ego stroked, and you don’t need to show off your awe­some imag­i­na­tion to every client. Your port­fo­lio does that just fine.

You have many other cool and prac­ti­cal ideas up your sleeve, but putting all your cards on the table at this time is not nec­es­sary. Save them. If the client does not buy any of the ideas you’ve fil­tered for them, even after you have jus­ti­fied their suit­abil­ity, you can fall back on those. Even if you lose round 1, you’re pre­pared for round 2.

Be Aware

Con­sider these points before attempt­ing a full-​​360 triple-​​duck-​​tailed high-​​board dive. This is not a com­pre­hen­sive list but a good start­ing point when decid­ing whether to show some or all of your ideas.

Know­ing Your Client: A Psy­cho­log­i­cal Angle

Ulti­mately, your flex­i­bil­ity in your pre­sen­ta­tion of ideas will be deter­mined by how well you know the client: get­ting a good sense of their per­son­al­ity, their brief and other per­son­al­ity– and business-​​related issues. You will also have to know the process that your con­tact will go through back at their base: are they the decider, or do they report back to a board or senior staff member?

When a group of peo­ple is involved in mak­ing deci­sions, you may want to keep a tighter reign on the cre­ative process. Pre­sent­ing too many ideas to one per­son can be over­whelm­ing, but too many ideas for a board of six spells disaster.

Being able to read peo­ple is not only use­ful: it can save your san­ity over time. Design and cre­ativ­ity are one thing, but if you want to excel at busi­ness and attract new clients, espe­cially as a free­lancer, being well versed in basic psy­chol­ogy goes a long way.

Cover Your Back: A Solid Brief

A tight brief is always essen­tial and one of the first things to cover before doing any­thing cre­ative. A firm and assured hand is often required. Research the com­pany. Under­stand its decision-​​making struc­ture. Your point of con­tact may not always be the decision-​​maker; you don’t want to pan­der to the wrong per­son. Pre-​​empt unde­sir­able out­comes by famil­iar­iz­ing your­self as much as pos­si­ble with your client and their busi­ness. For exam­ple, you may have been given a thor­ough brief, but if the per­son who pre­pared it is not respon­si­ble for mak­ing deci­sions, it could be all for nought.

The brief can change dur­ing a project, and it can change sig­nif­i­cantly with­out you being aware of it. The very nature of the cre­ative process and your col­lab­o­ra­tion with the client can unearth ideas not pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered. Be fluid and organic in your approach. When you feel the brief no longer reflects the direc­tion of the project, be pre­pared to revise it with the client.

Take a time-​​out, and give your­self time to breath and re-​​evaluate. Don’t feel pres­sured to com­mit. Assess the sit­u­a­tion and deter­mine whether a realign­ment is in order. Bet­ter to back­track a lit­tle now, because at the end you will just have fur­ther to backtrack.

Ask a lot of ques­tions. The more you immerse your­self in the project, the more famil­iar you will become with the sub­ject mat­ter. Don’t be afraid to keep ask­ing ques­tions if you feel they are impor­tant to the out­come of the project.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

For many free­lancers, meet­ing the client face to face is not always pos­si­ble, and you may run into com­pli­ca­tions if you haven’t made pro­vi­sions. Per­son­ally, I liaise with clients through email or Skype, but only when the brief and com­mu­ni­ca­tion are solid. If the responses are short or not forth­com­ing, then I take it to the phone. Only then am I able to get a sense of what the client is about.

In my expe­ri­ence, we are get­ting lazy as com­mu­ni­ca­tors, try­ing to deal with all aspects of life — busi­ness and per­sonal — via email and text mes­sages. Some clients I’ve had have refused to speak with me by phone, while their writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion failed to inspire me with confidence.

If this hap­pens to you, reflect on whether the project is worth tak­ing on. If you have prob­lems com­mu­ni­cat­ing before the project has even started, you will likely hit a brick wall when try­ing to get feed­back on cre­ative ideas or deal­ing with set-​​backs. I have on occa­sion “fired” clients because they were not pulling their weight, yet expected me to bust my gut. It doesn’t work like that.

A true col­lab­o­ra­tion requires the com­mit­ment of at least two peo­ple: the designer and client.

To Con­clude

There is no right or wrong answer to the ques­tion of whether to show all of your best ideas right away. Assess each client on their own terms and fig­ure out what’s best. Would the client be over­whelmed by too many choices, or would they wel­come the vari­ety? No one size fits all. On occa­sion, your expe­ri­ence or a hunch will tell you to focus on only one con­cept, with per­haps a few minor vari­a­tions. The work period may be slow, and you have only one project on the go and are happy to spend the extra time on what may be a valu­able repeat client.

Some­times stick­ing your neck out and giv­ing more than you are being paid to do is worth­while, but that’s a choice only you can make. Don’t make it a habit, or your clients will come to expect that extra work­load of you all the time: a quick path to free­lance burn-​​out.

Being a good judge of char­ac­ter, under­stand­ing human inter­ac­tion, being able to see past the here and now to pre-​​empt later prob­lems, all of this helps you keep your san­ity. Spend time learn­ing and research­ing not only cre­ative tech­niques but peo­ple, too. Your job and over­all qual­ity of life will improve as a result.

Your Thoughts

Are you guarded or care-​​free in shar­ing your ideas with clients? Do you have a one-​​size-​​fits-​​all solu­tion, or do you approach each client on their own terms? Have you dis­cov­ered cer­tain win­ning meth­ods of deal­ing with par­tic­u­lar situations?

We can all learn from one another’s expe­ri­ences in deal­ing with peo­ple in busi­ness. If you are start­ing out as a free­lancer, take what­ever advice oth­ers are will­ing to give.

Image Cred­its

• Choices by andreiz
• Few ideas by vbonomi
• Be aware by pic­tureper­fect­pose
• Cre­ative Brief by meine-​​erde
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion by larsk­flem
• Con­clu­sion by mrtea

(al)

© Gra­ham Smith for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | Be the first to com­ment | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: brief, ideas, logo design

Posted in Graphic Design | Comments Off

Favorites from our Tweets of the Dec 20 – Dec 26, 2009

This post is part of our weekly series of posts show­ing the most inspir­ing stuff selected by some of the 2expertsDesign team and users.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is sim­ply to fol­low us on Twit­ter, So take a look at the tweets that we sent out this past week. We’ve selected some our favorite and use­ful tweets for your inspi­ra­tion and to keep you updated about what’s going on out there!

If you don’t want to miss out our next posts, you can Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

35+ Usabil­ity Resources for Web Design­ers -
http://​ow​.ly/OtIX

Best Free Christ­mas Wall­pa­pers -
http://​ow​.ly/OunG

Ulti­mate Resource List for Vec­tor Graph­ics -
http://​ow​.ly/OtTS

Cre­ate Col­lage Design Pho­to­shop Tuto­r­ial -
http://​ow​.ly/OtYl

25 Cre­ative 404 Error Page Designs -
http://​ow​.ly/Ou4k

30 Impres­sive Ways to Design Sign-​​Up Page/​Form -
http://​ow​.ly/Ouhp

125+ Unusual Crazy Adver­tise­ment Designs will Grab your Atten­tion -
http://​ow​.ly/Ouj7

Multi level dropdown/​flyout menu – NO hacks, NO con­di­tional com­ments, NO tables and NO javascript -
http://​ow​.ly/Oulp

How to Get a Pro­fes­sional Look With Color -
http://​ow​.ly/Outh

15 Incred­i­ble Apple Web­de­sign Style Cod­ing Tuto­ri­als -
http://​ow​.ly/OuDf

40 Awe­some Web­sites with Big Back­grounds -
http://​ow​.ly/OuFV

81 Inspir­ing Sketchs from Flickr -
http://​ow​.ly/OuI2

99 Beau­ti­ful Christ­mas Wall­pa­pers to Spice Up Your Desk­top -
http://​ow​.ly/OuLi

Comic : How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell -
http://​ow​.ly/OPaL

35 Adobe AIR Tuto­ri­als for Web Devel­op­ers -
http://​ow​.ly/OVEq

30 Best CSS Tech­niques for a Unique Nav­i­ga­tion -
http://​ow​.ly/OVQy

Enjoy this Post? Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Our blog is updated reg­u­larly with con­tent related to web design, inspi­ra­tion, tuto­ri­als, word­press, free­bies and much more. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can sub­scribe by RSS or Email

Posted in Graphic Design, Resources, Web Design | Comments Off

35+ New Year Wallpapers to Celebrate The MMX or 2010

We all love desk­top wall­pa­pers as they always come in handy and you will always find a wall­pa­per to express your feel­ings or mood. I know some of my friends who keep chang­ing their desk­top back­ground almost on a daily basis. Unless like me, who rarely change their desk­top wall­pa­per. So, How about you? When was the last time you changed desk­top background?

2010 (MMX) is a com­mon year start­ing on Fri­day in accor­dance with the Gre­go­rian cal­en­dar. It is also the first year of the 2010s decade. It’s almost party time so start col­lect­ing the party songs, con­jure up some cool cos­tumes and pre­pare joy, and don’t for­get about your com­put­ers. In this post we present amaz­ing col­lec­tion of New Year wall­pa­pers related to typog­ra­phy, cul­ture, events and, of Course, lots of col­ors. Hope­fully, every­body will find some­thing inter­est­ing to refresh their desk­top in this cel­e­bra­tion time.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing wall­pa­per related arti­cles as well.

• 99 Beau­ti­ful Christ­mas Wall­pa­pers to Spice Up Your Desktop
• Beau­ti­ful Christ­mas Wall­pa­pers – Part I, Part II
• 55+ Amaz­ing Hal­loween Wall­pa­pers to Charm Up Your Desktop
• Amaz­ing Wall­pa­pers Col­lec­tion – Widescreen, Dual Screen, Triple Mon­i­tor
• Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of Beau­ti­ful iPhone Wallpapers
• New Year Wall­pa­pers from inst­ant­Shift– 2009

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to other new year wall­pa­pers that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Web Design | Comments Off

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.

Down­load the icon set for free!

You can use the 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. Please link to this arti­cle if you want to spread the word.

• down­load the set (incl. vec­tor source) (.zip, 3.5 Mb)
• IconEden’s release post

Behind the design

As always, here are some insights from the designer himself:

Dear Smash­ing Mag­a­zine read­ers, Xmas is com­ing! And we’re as excited about it as you’re. How­ever, our inspi­ra­tion comes from the work that we’re craft­ing every­day. And so, to dou­ble the joy, Smash­ing Mag­a­zine and IconE­den hap­pily announce the imme­di­ate avail­abil­ity of “Yummy”, our new icon set which heav­ily focuses on, ahem, food!

And it’s all yours. Bake it into your projects, use it in your Xmas greet­ings, or sim­ply imag­ine your­self enjoy­ing it! Sim­i­lar to pre­vi­ous col­lec­tions, Yummy comes in vec­tor and pixel for­mats and can be imme­di­ately built into your projects at no cost. And of course, we’d love to hear from you. Do let us know what you think about Yummy by either leav­ing us a comment.

IconE­den, the crown jewel of Frexy Stu­dio, pro­vides pre­mium icons for web­sites and inter­faces. We love free­bies too! That’s why we’ve reg­u­larly released free icons to the world to show you how grate­ful we’re for being able to do what we love to do.

– IconE­den Team

Thank you very much, guys! We really appre­ci­ate your efforts.

We wish our read­ers Merry Christ­mas with your fam­ily and friends and, of course, have a tasty Christ­mas din­ner!

© Smash­ing Edi­to­r­ial for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | 7 com­ments | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: Free­bies, Icons

Posted in Graphic Design | Comments Off