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Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3

January 8th, 2009 in CSS | 69 Comments

There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design. These features include CSS styling rules that are being released with the upcoming CSS3 specification.

Realistically, you won't be able to use these on your everyday client projects for another few years, but for design blogs and websites aimed at the Web design community, these features can help you push the boundaries of modern Web design today, adding that extra spice to your design and helping the industry move forward. Here are five techniques snatched from the future that you can put into practice in your website designs today.

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Twitter Avatars In Comments Wordpress Plugin

January 8th, 2009 in Freebies | 47 Comments

Over the last months Twitter has become extremely popular across the Web, with more blogs, magazines and companies using it to communicate with their audience and their customers. Even we started twittering a couple of months ago and have over 3,650 followers now. Please feel free to join us and follow Smashing Magazine on Twitter as well.

Although we aren't sure if "Twitter" will actually revolutionize blogs, Twitter is definitely changing the way site owners communicate with their visitors and we, designers, need to be aware of that and use appropriate tools to meet the expectations of our clients. Unfortunately, there are not that many plugins and extensions for Twitter out there, so we decided to release one — the Twitter Comments Wordpress Plugin.

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Textures In Modern Web Design

January 7th, 2009 in Design Showcase | 57 Comments

If you look around at well-designed websites in CSS galleries or any other source of design inspiration, you'll see that texture is extremely common in modern Web design. One of the reasons it's so popular is because of its versatility. Textures can be used in countless different ways and in a wide variety of design styles. As you look around, you'll see how textures can be used in so many different ways by Web designers.

Textures in Web design can be very subtle, so that the visitor hardly notices, or they can be a focal point of the design. In some cases, textures are used to emphasize certain parts of the design. Because of the versatility of textures, they can be used in combination with many other design elements, such as typography, lighting and colors.

When examining exemplary Web designs that employ textures, you'll notice that textures are used in background images, headers, footers, sidebars, content areas and even fonts. Although texture is sometimes associated with a grunge style of design, its reach extends far beyond just grungy websites. Texture adds dimension to virtually any style of design, if applied properly. In this post, we'll look at 50 examples of websites that use textures in different ways.

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10 Killer WordPress Hacks

January 7th, 2009 in How-To | 130 Comments

2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.

In this article, we'll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you'll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.

You may be interested in the following related articles as well:
- 8 Useful Wordpress SQL Hacks
- 10 Useful RSS Hacks For Wordpress
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100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers

January 6th, 2009 in Graphics | 115 Comments

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

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

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

January 5th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 86 Comments

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

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

January 5th, 2009 in Freebies | 62 Comments

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

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

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50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials

January 4th, 2009 in Tutorials | 53 Comments

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

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

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

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