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- Smashy The Alien Icon SetYesterday
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We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. And we support them financially and with a broad coverage in our magazine. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place. In fact, the results are quite often pretty impressive. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.
Today we are glad to release a free Smashy The Alien icon set. The set contains 8 icons (RSS, news, home, download, contact, calendar, blog and Smashing) with a nice modest alien who is just too shy to show his face completely. You can use the set for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.
The icons are available in .ico and .png-formats in resolutions 32×32px, 48×48px, 64×64px and 128×128px. If you love Smashing Magazine just like Smashy does feel free to place him on your blog.
This icon set was designed by Maja Bencic aka Abeja from Croatia especia
- How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?July 22
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by Brian D. Armstrong
You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such circles unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You’ll hear ideas being thrown around like “design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1″ or “we are not worried about the design, we’ll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product”.
You can almost sense a little bit of pride in how ugly their web-site is, or that they are treating design like a commodity. However off base these types of thoughts might be, there is clearly a lack of respect for designers in the business community at times. I’d like to address how you can shatter this barrier and talk to business folk in a language they understand.
This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a designer to “speak business” — even if it’s just to get your foot in the door or land a big project.
1. Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!
Designers like to show off portfolios. It can look stunning, but business people like to see numbers. What was the conversion rate on that opt in? What was the bounce rate and average time on site? What was the most clicked on link from the home page?
To a bu
- Pop Art Is Alive: Classics and Modern ArtworksJuly 21
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As a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s, pop art aims to emphasize the nature of things popular in our daily routine. In the pop art most artists used mechanical means of rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist. Being an art movement, it has some expressive attributes other styles do not possess.
In pop art vivid manifestation of pop culture reflects in vibrant colors and busy, sometimes hardly recognizable artistic approaches. Street culture, trash, collage, comic books, grunge, graffiti and photo montage are usual design elements and have been widely used by designers and artists few decades ago. And since grunge found its way back and becomes popular again, it makes perfectly sense to analyze design elements of pop art which are similar to this artistic style.
This post presents 75 outstanding examples of classic and modern pop art. Hopefully, everybody will find some inspiration for future works or at least smile when scanning the images presented below. Please notice: pop art can be quite vibrant and not necessarily pretty — in fact, some examples show that it doesn’t have to be pretty at all.
Please take a look at the following similar and related posts:
- Write a Guest Post and Win Apple MacBook AirJuly 17
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As you may know, we are looking for motivated, talented and professional writers and authors. And we are paying each author $100-300 per post — depending on the quality of the delivered article. If you think that you are one of them contact us — we want you, we need you, we can’t live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team.
And to spark your interest for writing we’ve decided to announce a guest author contest — write a small guest article for Smashing Magazine and win one of dozens of attractive prizes waiting for you.
Awards
Best guest articles will be published on Smashing Magazine with the link to the author’s site. The best guest post will be determined by the editorial team and will be awarded with Apple MacBook Air, a compact, ultrathin 13.3″ laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive) released by Apple few months ago.
Apart from that the places 2-5 will be awarded with attractive designer laptop sleeves and bags. And the places 6-10 will be awarded with design and web-development related books. We also have a pretty ni
- Wordpress Fun: A Free Wordpress ThemeJuly 16
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If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free Wordpress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.
Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.
Today we are glad to release a wordpress.fun — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 2 columns, thumbnails integration, a “featured” post section as well as a nice grungy design. The theme was designed by Maleika Attawel from Germany, purchased by Smashing Magazine and is now released as a gift for our readers.
Download the theme for free!
You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine
