Today we’re announcing the winners of the UPrinting contest that we held on WDD for the past week.
Many thanks to all of you who participated. The response was great and we’ve got almost 500 comments.
Each of the 10 winners has won a set of 500 free business cards of their choice with free shipping to anywhere in the world.
The winners were selected at random and you can see the results after the jump…
Ugly designs abound on the web, and behind each and every one of them is a “designer”.
In many of these cases the designers behind the sites are simply incompetent.
They’re often amateur designers or those who have little or no design training or people who design their own sites based on a book from their local library that’s ten years out of date.
But there are other times when the designer was perfectly capable of creating a better site…
The design profession is full of happy folks, and understanding why so many designers enjoy their work is not hard. But not all are so happy. If you’re not careful, the joy of getting paid to pursue your passion can be tainted by the less joyous realities of the professional world.
You see, no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in professional matters, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised…
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…
Although much valuable information for all sorts of web and print professionals can be found online, it is often difficult to weed through all the noise and find good quality content. I believe it’s vital that professionals in different creative fields supplement their online learning and research through well-edited and high-quality print publications.
Print magazines, more often than not, are well-researched and are headed by top-notch editorial staff, usually containing information and resources on the cutting edge of their respective industries’ trends and happenings…
Content sliders are extremely versatile forms of navigation that can be used to display all sorts of information, such as images, popular posts, social information and product features.
Some have automatic slideshow capabilities or buttons to scroll sideways or up and down, and most of them feature a transition effect, usually a slide motion.
Sliders can be great focal points on websites and blogs as they instantly draw the audience’s attention and provide for an easy and sleek way for visitors to interact with a lot of information that can be sorted through quickly…
Adobe Illustrator is a powerful software for illustrating that allows users to produce beautiful artwork, technical illustrations, and even graphics for both print and the web. Adobe Illustrator is a multipurpose vector illustration tool and its versatility makes it the most preferred choice among many professional artists and designers.
In the past, we’ve published a collection of Beautiful Photoshop Illustrations By Artists Around The World, and this is the latest post that will showcase the power of Adobe Illustrator…
Recently, the notion of killing the design community has come up on a few blogs (sometimes indirectly), creating many intense conversations on the direction the design community has taken over the past couple of years, and what can be done about it.
The possibility that such discussions are going to improve the design community is quite troubling.
In the interests of taking advantage of this recent trend (namely, writing about “killing the community”), I felt it would be necessary to address this issue by describing some easy-to-learn and practical tips that will help all of us do our part in killing the community…
App Store is a competitive environment. Against more than 140,000 apps, all screaming for attention, how do you make sure your app gets its time in the spotlight? What does it take to get good media coverage? How do you get people to talk about your app—and, ideally, how do you get them to buy it and show it to their friends?
Following the simple rules laid out below, you will increase your chances in the battle for fame and glory…
Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.
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This week Joost is joined by Jeff Chandler of the WordPress Tavern and Grant Griffiths of the Headway theme. They discussed all of the implications of themes and plugins being GPL or not, and why people would and in Joost’s opinion should choose to be GPL. Also some discussion came up about how theme and plugin authors should be credited.
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There has been much written surrounding classic query types. In review, there are basically three kinds:
We all know that as web designers, we should market ourselves both online and offline.
For online purposes, a great portfolio website or blog is a perfect way to spread the word, but for offline purposes, nothing beats the traditional business card.
We’ve partnered with UPrinting to bring an amazing contest to WDD. One week from today, we will be awarding 10 prizes of 500 free business cards each!!!
You can choose from a variety of business card styles, such as the traditional US Standard, square, slim and specialty shapes…
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…
Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go.
I came into my first job as a Web designer for Boeing back in the mid-1990s, with no formal design training. I was lucky to get some training on the job, and I would guess that my experience there was similar to that of many who are reading this article…
As the first thing visitors see, home pages and headers often steal the design spotlight.
But above-the-fold thinking neglects the natural flow of vertical page layout. What happens when people reach the end of a page?
You can bet that a simple copyright statement won’t hold visitors’ attention, but many pages are designed with the expectation that people will find their way… or so we assume…
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…
There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever effects that use the power of style sheets and some features of the upcoming CSS Text Level 3 specification, which should give Web designers finer control over text…
In his previous post here on Yoast, Frederick explained why you should Microformats to increase the CTR from Google. In the comments of that post, people where asking if there are plugins to easily implement this in your theme. While those are probably a bit hard to do, I though it would be good to explain how I implemented hreview in my theme.
How I “activate” a review
I alluded to it in last tuesdays podcast with Dougal Campbell: When I add a custom field “rating” to a post, my theme now automatically marks up that post as an hreview microformat…
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…
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…
Over the years designers have pushed themselves to create unique and inspiring designs. Companies have yearned to have websites which are innovative and make them stand out against their competitors. Yet charity websites have not progressed along with trends and expectations — they seem to have been designed for launch and then only updated with minor tweaks to suit the content…
The visual language of a website impresses a visitor far beyond their first glimpse.
In fact, in observing the best websites, you notice that the small details speak to you subconsciously and that consistency improves your experience of the website and as a result makes you more likely to return.
In this article we’ll explore what makes a design consistent, and we’ll showcase some of the most consistent website designs out there…
Inspiration can be a fickle thing. Most designers, when lacking ideas, turn to design galleries to find ideas. But there are a few problems with that approach. The most obvious is that when taking inspiration from similar mediums, there’s a fine line between “inspired by” and “copied”. To some extent, looking at established website designs can also be somewhat limiting, especially if you’re looking for a fresh solution to a problem…
The new Google Jazz interface has received another facelift and continues to evolve. Initially the new interface, which was rolled out on a very limited basis in November, was showing only a 5- Pack of local listings. Earlier this month it was modified once again to show the 7 Pack. The new tweak cleans up the interface by eliminating the color block and a number of menus along the left hand side…
The iPhone is arguably the most revolutionary product Apple has released in its existence.
With nearly 50 million iPhones sold to date, there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of iPhone cases that have been created.
In this article, we have compiled some of the most creative ones, but also a few of the wackiest and most unusal iPhone cases that we have ever seen.
What do you think of these designs? Please leave links to other interesting iPhone cases which you may have seen, in the comments are below…
Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers.
This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design…
Newspapers around the world are struggling to survive while competing with websites that offer comparable news more quickly and without a subscription fee.
Many newspapers have embraced the Internet and use their own websites to post news. But their online revenue is a fraction of what they got from print advertising and subscriptions.
Newspapers are losing money and one by one are going bankrupt…
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…
It’s time for something brand new and exciting on Smashing Magazine. Actually, we have quite a few things in the works, and today we are happy to reveal one of them. Over the years, we have published many lengthy articles, and now we want to write some shorter ones for a change. We want to launch the Smashing Email Newsletter and we prepared some nice prizes for our subscribers…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
