With the ever-changing landscape that is the internet, web designers and developers are constantly tasked with redesigning some part of the web. Whether it be for our own sites or for those of a client, redesigning is a big part of working in the field right now. For whatever reasons, be it the growth and popular new directions of the web, or even a desire to keep your brand fresh, the web these days seems to be in a constant state of redesign…

At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the text-based computer terminals of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s…

When I wrote about QR codes (Designed QR codes: the next level), it was very well received. When I wrote “SnapTags: Will they kill QR codes?” people got a little nasty with their suggestion on what I could do with snaptags and my mother. Now that I’m delving into Augmented Reality, I’m wondering what suggestions people will have for me…and certain family members when I insist that AR is the future of digital media?

According to Wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data…

In the Stone Age of computers and digital storage, there were little “floppy disks” that promised holding an entire megabyte of space… although it was really only 978 kilobytes. AOL would send these little plastic disks to every household each and every month, hoping computer users would sign up for that now antiquated and laughable hook up to the internet…

Straight from Google’s Quality Guidelines comes the mantra for the white-hat SEO community: “Build your site for users, not search engines.” And Google means it.

The search giant disclosed its latest algorithm update includes page layout as a ranking factor, with a focus on how much above-the-fold real estate is dedicated to visible content vs. advertising or other distracting, useless shiny things (like splash pages)…

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…

At Smashing Magazine, we are big proponents of diversity and sharing. We encourage designers and developers worldwide to step up and use Smashing Magazine as a platform to share their opinions, ideas or techniques. Our editorial process is quite evolved, yet we are very open to users’ suggestions. In fact, if an author has something to say, we try to help them collect their thoughts, strengthen their points and sharpen their language…

In all the years that I’ve been using Adobe Fireworks, I have always had to perform one task in every project: remove the background from a logo. Most of the time, it’s because the client doesn’t have the original raw file that their previous designer used to create their company’s logo, or because I need to work with a bunch of affiliate logos that I downloaded from the Web and not all of them have transparency information…

Google announced they rolled out their anti-overly-aggressive-ads algorithm. They didn’t give a specific % on how much of the above the fold content can be ads, but suggest using their browser preview tool. Using that tool on Google.com’s search results would of course score it as a spam site, but for some small AdSense webmasters that avoided Panda, Google may have drew first blood.

Much Quicker Updates

With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda, the first bite might seem like a big concern, however the “too many ads” algorithm updates far more frequently than Panda does:

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes…

We’ve just released ZeroBundle.com It’s a brand new website, brought to you by WDD and MightyDeals.com, where we offer fantastic freebies for designers for a limited time only.

The bundle includes hundreds of professional and exclusive resources such as PSDs, vectors, brushes, icons, textures, UI elements and a bunch more. The files are provided by professional designers and are available for both personal and commercial uses…

A logo is an essential part of branding your website and marketing it offline and online. Some logo designs feature simple, beautiful typography whilst others more are fun and colourful. However, all logos should be memorable and able to integrate with your website design effortlessly.

One of the best ways of getting inspiration for a logo design is by looking at what other designers have created…

Integrating social media services in your website design is vital if you want to make it easy for readers to share your content. While some users are happy with the social media buttons that come built into their design template, the majority of WordPress users install a plugin to automatically embed sharing links on their pages. Many of you will find that a plugin does exactly what you need; others not so much…

Designing a new website is great, but not everyone loves taking their PSD designs and converting them into actual, working HTML and CSS.

In fact, there are some designers who positively hate it (and often get someone else to do that part for them rather than suffer through it themselves).

A PSD to HTML service can be a huge time-saver even for designers who don’t mind coding their own designs…

Starting today, we’d like to invite K-12 students in the U.S. to participate in our fifth annual U.S. Doogle 4 Google contest. Draw your rendition of the Google logo and you may see it on the ultimate gallery: the Google homepage. The winning doodler will also take home a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school.

The theme for this year’s contest is “If I could travel in time, I’d visit…

Two bills currently making their way through the United States Congress—SOPA and PIPA—threaten freedom of expression and security online, not to mention the American economy (and economies of countries directly tied to the U.S.).

In protest of these two incredibly dangerous and damaging bills, large portions of the internet will voluntarily blackout in whole or in part on Wednesday, January 18th…

It seems things are changing for website design. The minimalist style adopted by many websites is slowly being evolved into something a little more engaging. One of the main sources of inspiration for this change in the way website content is displayed has been print design, particularly newspapers and magazines. Here are some fine examples of print design inspired websites…

As technology evolves, so does the art and craft of Web design. New technology creates new challenges, which require new solutions. Often we’re working in uncharted territory, where the solutions demanded really are new. Other times, we’re faced with problems of a more universal nature, problems that have a history.

Given the limited history of Web design, we have to look beyond our immediate domain for answers to the more challenging questions…

I love Twit Cleaner!

Some of my work recently has involved creating a follow policy as well as helping manage a Twitter account for a software protection company called Wibu, through my job with illuminea (they’re illuminea’s client, not my own).

Anyways, I was going through the people Wibu were following and realized loads of them were irrelevant – based on their bios/descriptions – but that checking for dead accounts, bots etc isn’t easy based on Twitter’s web interface alone…

As creatives, most times we feel like we can do it all, or we are put in a position to do it all. We typically take on a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ mentality, that can either help or harm us.

For some odd reason, there seems to be a discrepancy of sorts when it comes to doing the work for ourselves. Some designers feel like of course we should take on that Jack-of-all-trades mindset, while others just feel like it makes sense to pass the work off and let someone else do it…

There’s a little bit of murmuring going on that the design technique, most affectionately referred to as minimalism, is dying and/or dead. I couldn’t disagree more. I believe that minimalism is not dead, mainly because people don’t quite realize what it is.

Unfortunately, it seems like people think of it more as a style or trend, rather than what I truly think it is–more of a technique or a loose rubric…

In this article, we’ll look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), one of the most underused technologies in website development today.

Before diving into an example, let’s consider the state of the Web at present and where it is going. Website design has found new vigor in recent years, with the evolving technique of responsive design. And for good reason: essentially, responsive website design moves us away from the fixed-width pages we’ve grown accustomed to, replacing them with shape-shifting layouts and intelligent reflowing of content…

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…

A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can put together a great readme.txt for the WordPress plugin directory. In addition to using a WordPress readme as a tool to help out your users, you can use it to promote your commercial products and services. While commercial theme developers are already promoted on WordPress.org, this promotion isn’t extended to commercial plugin developers…

Today we have a great exclusive freebie from our good friends at Grafpedia.

The Balio UI Kit is an absolutely massive PSD file containing buttons, stickers, icons, pagination, menus, login forms and much much more. It’s a very high quality UI kit that can come in really handy for your designs.

The set was designed by Grafpedia, where they teach you how to advance your design skills and they also constantly publish loads of graphic resources such as icons, vectors, brushes, textures and a whole bunch of other stuff…

If you want to design websites or modify your existing website design, then you need to have at least a basic knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Thankfully, CSS is a very easy language to get to a grip on, however you may find it takes a little more time to master it.

Today we would like to share with you 40 resources that will help you on your CSS journey…

We’ve come a long way since the days of the first Macintosh and the introduction of graphical user interfaces, going from monochrome colors to millions, from estranged mice to intuitive touchscreens, from scroll bars to pinch, zoom, flick and pan. But while hardware, software and the people who use technology have all advanced dramatically over the past two decades, our approach to designing interfaces has not…

The SEOmoz Marketplace, born in early 2007, passed away peacefully in January 2012. Cause of death: Old, out-dated code, 5 year old design, manual spam maintenance and was ridden with unfixable bugs. The Marketplace lived a very full life and helped many people find their perfect SEO job, while giving companies a place to show their stuff. Our dear Marketplace was loved by all and spammed by many…

SEO can be a very daunting task.  With the help of plug-ins, this daunting task becomes a piece of cake.  As we all know search engine optimization is extremely important for any website or blog in order to be found on search engines like Google, Yahoo and others.

In order to ensure that we meet our SEO goals, we must make sure that we do it properly. Performing search engine optimization tasks improperly can put you even farther behind than where you started…

As we are always looking for ways to show our appreciation to our readers, and provide you all with exciting and useful web design and development related resources we have a special treat that hits both of those marks. Today we have a brand new exclusive freebie for Noupe and all fans of fresh and sharply designed social media icons. From the creative mind of one of our regular Illustrator experts, Jasmina Stanojevic, comes this handy new set of vector designs…

Social media and web app integration is becoming a vital part of any successful website. You need to interact with your visitors on a variety of platforms is you want to create loyal, return visitors and fans.

The Wibiya toolbar lets you integrate a variety of social plugins, free apps, games, video and image galleries, and more into your website to increase page views, increase visitor engagement, and better promote your content…