By Melinda Rainsberger

More and more, designers, illustrators and coders are being asked to animate. Animation adds energy to a brand and heightens a customer’s emotional response. The software to do it is reasonably priced, and Internet connections can now deliver high-quality video. For these two reasons, animation-based advertising is booming on the Web. The makers of a small phone application might even devote a great deal of their budget to a Web animation that explains how the application works…

Photo manipulation is an art that requires lots of patience along with the expertise in Photoshop and other photo editing tools. With your creativity and imagination, you can manipulate any photograph the way you want! Now it’s all about your imagination and using Photoshop’s effects and other tools cleverly.

You simply have to experiment with different effects to see what feeling they give you as having expertise in Photoshop can help you greatly in producing amazing results…

By Paul Viluda

The word “calligraphy” is derived from two Greek words, denoting “beautiful writing”. Calligraphy or the art of writing has thousands of years in its history and development, and indeed calligraphy fonts, which we often use these days on our PCs to create a postcard or a wedding invitation card, are absolutely about aesthetics, refinement, creativity, and pure beauty…

By Obaid Rehman

In this post we showcase some extremely charming examples of Fashion Photography. This kind of photography is usually used for advertisement purposes, but now with the advancement of fashion industry it has now become a field of its own. We hope you’ll like this collection. Kindly feel free to express your views on Fashion Photography and do let us know if we have missed your favorite one…

Unbelievable, magical, miraculous….one can go on using adjectives, but nothing can come close to describing what wonders 3D can to. It can turn any imagination into such stunning real like pictures that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two. Software like 3D Max, Blender, Cellular Imaging, CAD etc, give cutting edge to the creativity of 3 D designers and Architects…

The market for freelance web design is huge. Being able to design a beautiful site in Photoshop is one thing. Programming a website is a whole other story.

So when clients come knocking at your door asking for web design services, what do you, the non-programmer but rockstar designer, tell them? “Sorry, I only design, I don’t code.” No! You take the job, and team up with an equally rockstar-esque programmer to develop the site that you design…

By Callum Chapman

In this ultimate collection, we bring you a massive selection of great Web design tutorials from all over the design community. All of the tutorials use Photoshop for the main application. By the end, you should have a pretty good idea of where and how to start designing for the Web.

If you’re already an experienced Web designer, don’t ignore this post…

Today we are glad to release Free SEO Icons Set, a set with 16 original SEO-icons in .png (64×64px). This set was designed by Andrea Auston and released for private use 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…

By Alyssa Gregory

The ability to communicate, and communicate well, is one of the biggest factors in business success. You could be an excellent designer, but if you’re unable to promote your services and communicate effectively with clients and colleagues, your potential is limited. The principal areas where communication is essential include:

• Pitching potential clients,
• Client meetings,
• Customer service,
• Face-to-face networking,
• Marketing your business

Pitching Potential Clients

When you freelance or own a business, your livelihood depends on your ability to sell your services…

Everybody knows you’re not supposed to play with your food but that doesn’t stop these artists from creating some rather extraordinary edible art. Far from the mountains you used to make with your mashed potatoes, these masterpieces could go on display in a museum. Mixing together a little food and a lot of talent is the perfect recipe for some mouth watering inspiration…

By Louis Lazaris

If you’ve been formally educated in marketing, more than likely you’ve learned about a marketing model called AIDA. AIDA is an acronym that represents the different steps involved in selling a product or service. Very often, the principles of AIDA are applied naturally when a useful product or service is being marketed. Being web designers and app developers, however, our personal involvement on a technical level in our own or client projects may deter our efforts to produce a design that correctly implements AIDA…

Spring is the perfect time to rejoice and enjoy the beauty of nature; it is the time when beautiful flowers blossom and beautify the whole world around them with their delicate feel. The beautiful season of spring is about to come, so we decided to spark your inspiration with a showcase of flower photos. We hope that you will fall in love with these beautiful photos.

Beautiful Photos of Flowers

Water lily

Summer Light

Yellow Rose

Flight of the Bumblebee

Bent Beauty

Bathed in the sun

fire in the fields

MY LOVE OF FLOWERS, and ‘beauty’

Datura II

Tulips

Beautiful Flower

In Blue …

Since the origin of 3D graphics, designers attempts to create photo-realistic imagery. Although achieving genuine-looking graphics is a difficult challenge, some artists manage to achieve extraordinary results. Photorealism opens up new ways for creativity and innovation.

In this collection we bring you some of the inspiring semi-photorealistic 3D cartoon characters from various artists across the globe…

Here is something for a slow lousy Sunday: in this inspirational round-up we feature some outstanding interactive installations that explore the art of interaction between environment, users and machines. Extraordinary artworks. Take a look at 15 beautiful examples of interactive installations: experiments, motions, applications and more.

Installations / Applications

N Building N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district…

jQuery can empower a developer with the tools required to create a better richer user experience. The way in which we display images, text, charts and graphs can enhance functionality for the wide range of users. Let’s take a look at 35 powerful and effective jQuery plugins and techniques for slideshows, graphs and text effects.

Also consider our previous articles:

• 50 Useful JavaScript Tools which lists excellent tools to help you achieve various tasks involved in authoring JavaScript code…

By Cameron Chapman

Many designers enjoy creating WordPress themes. And creating a theme isn’t that difficult if you have a basic grasp of CSS and can follow directions (WordPress’s Codex has extensive documentation). But that doesn’t mean that every designer out there who can create a theme has created a good theme. In fact, really poor themes abound.

But what exactly makes a WordPress theme great? How does one go about creating a quality theme? In fact, it’s not that difficult…

African art represents one of the most diverse legacies on Earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize “traditional” African art, the continent is full of peoples, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. Africa is well known for its wonderful art and culture that we are going to showcase in this post. Here, we’re presenting some of the brilliant pieces of African Inspired Digital Artworks…

By Graham Smith

In another free font exclusive on Noupe, we present Rubber Font, a neat display font created by Yiorgos Yiacos. Rubber Font is a working but limited version containing roman capitals, numerals and some of the points of punctuation. Rubber Font is available as a free download for personal use only below.

Designer Profile

My name is Yiorgos Yiacos. I’m an illustrator and graphic designer…

By Obaid ur Rehman

Valentine’s Day is coming and it’s just about time to give presents to your beloved ones. We took a look around and selected some memorable, eye-catching and appealing gift packages and wrappers. We also present some Saint Valentine’s Day inspired photos.

So in this post we are featuring all sorts of gift packages, gift wrapping, gift boxes, ribbons, tags and many more… so that you can choose the most interesting one to wrap your precious gift with…

Today we share a very comprehensive round-up of Cinema 4D Tutorials. Cinema 4D is a modeling, animation and rendering application that is noted for its flexible interface and ease of use. It is capable of procedural and polygonal/subd modeling, animating, lighting, texturing and rendering. Movies like Monster House, Spiderman 3, Chronicles of Narnia, Beowulf and Polar Express are all examples of Cinema 4D Graphics being in use…

Desktop wallpapers are the simplest and quickest way to personalize your desktop. With so many free designs to choose from, you can easily change your wallpaper to change your mood or rotate between a collection of your favorites. Wallpapers can inspire you, remind you to take a break or just make you smile and actually improve your mood or focus with just a couple clicks.

We have put together this collection of personal favorites that you may also like for your collection…

By Nousheen Aquil

This post is dedicated to Waves and Surfing Waves Photography. Waves booming against the seashore can be a very soothing experience for anyone. Almost everyone loves the beauty of sea and ocean waves are the most attractive and appealing thing for everyone. However, waves do not have to look calm and nice. They can be aggressive, too.

Ocean wave photos, pictures of wave curls, ocean wave pictures, and other big wave pictures will bring the ocean and the upcoming summer season to you…

Last year, more than 63 million people in the United States accessed the Internet from a mobile device. It’s forecast that by 2013 there will be more than 1.7 billion mobile Internet users worldwide. With those kinds of numbers, it’s imperative that web designers and developers learn optimal development and design practices for mobile devices.

For the most part you won’t need to learn any new technologies for mobile site design…

Designing your own (or redesigning existing) gadgets such as MP3 Players, Game Consoles and Computers is an incredible way to improve your general skills in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (or any other design-related software package for that matter). You’re bound to pick up new skills every time, even if you’re considered an expert.

The following round-up of tutorials consists of 60 great gadget tutorials…

By Thursday Bram

There’s no formula for a perfect portfolio. There’s no format that’s guaranteed to land you clients, as long as you follow it. However, there are certain questions that a prospective client has in mind when he’s looking for a web designer. If your portfolio can supply the answers a client wants, you can improve your portfolio’s ability to convince a client and land a new project…

Today we are glad to release Valentine’s Icon Set, a set with 10 free icons in resolutions 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px and 150×150px in formats .ico, .png and .icns. This set was designed by Iconsmaster and released especially for Noupe and its readers. The set was created from scratch using Adobe Fireworks — the .png-sources are available for free download as well…

By Aquil Akhter

Surreal Art is getting so much attention because it lets an artist freely express his creativity, feelings and the way he thinks. It is the medium of art in which you can showcase your talent and creativity in the most meaningful and the most intangible way. This is the main reason why Surreal Art is getting so popular these days. We have compiled a list of some inspirational Surreal artwork for you…

While some animals hibernate in the winter and prefer to sun themselves during the warmer months, other animals are perfectly comfortable with the snow and offer photographers a plenty of opportunities for remarkable photos. To celebrate the nicer facets of the leaving winter, we now collected some beautiful and adorable photos of animals in snow. These photos are nice to look at and will help you get a break from the regular work and hopefully get a fresh perspective on whatever you have to get done today…

By Cameron Chapman

Proper use of image compression can make a huge difference in the appearance and size of your website image files. But compression is an often-misunderstood topic, partly because there’s a real lack of understanding on what the different types of compression are good for. If you don’t understand which type of compression to use for different types of images, you’ll likely end up with one of two results: either images that don’t look as good as they could, or image file sizes that are way larger than they need to be…

Information graphics, or infographics, are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. The graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as on signs and maps and in journalism, technical writing and education. Today, infographics surround us in the media, in published works both mainstream and scientific and in road signs and manuals…