Smashing Magazine

Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation. In your case, annoying a few users wouldn't be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you'd better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Even if you don't have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It's 1997 all over again.

Performance is an expert's game... to an extent. You can do innumerable things to make a website perform well, and much of it requires in-depth knowledge and boring testing and research. I am sure a potential market exists for website performance optimization, much like there is one now for search engine optimization. Interestingly, Google recently announced that it will factor performance into its search rankings, so this is already happening. That said, you can do a lot of things without having to pay someone to point out the obvious.

We're all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we're interested in. That's why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.

Jesse James Garett, founder of Adaptive Path and author of the book The Elements of User Experience, speaks on what UX and UX design is, what UX looked like before and what are some of the challenges people are encountering now. He cites engagement as the main goal of UX design and, through some fantastic examples, shows that engagement is an universal quality achieved through visuality, sound, touch, smell, taste, body and mind. One of the most impressive moments from the session is when Jesse compares Beethoven to an experience designer, accompanied by the Ninth Symphony.

The navigation menu is perhaps a website's single most important component. Navigation gives you a window onto the website designer's creative ability to produce a functional yet visually impressive element that's fundamental to most websites. Because of their value to websites, navigation menus are customarily placed in the most visible location of the page, and thus can make a significant impact on the visitor's first impression.

The design of a navigation menu has to be outstanding in order to sustain the user's interest. As the adage goes, "Content is king," but getting to the content requires navigation. In this post, we'll be explore some of the more recent trends in navigation design. We'll look at the aesthetics that recur in today's best Web designs. The focus here is on the visual direction that leading designers are taking.

You should also read the following related posts:

• Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples
• 50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus
• CSS-Based Navigation Menus: Modern Solutions
• Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices

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. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 35 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for January 2010?

It is a most beautiful experience — the sounds and colors of fireworks in the silence and darkness of night. Words alone cannot describe such an experience. The sky comes alive with so many vibrant hues, starbursts, and showers of light along with ribbons of smoke, making us happy and awestruck. Photographing fireworks, however, is not an easy task.

To celebrate the beauty of fireworks, we present a showcase of beautiful fireworks photography. Each image is linked to the original photographer's page with their profile names — so you can view more of their work or even thank them for their contribution. And finally, remember to have a camera handy this coming New Year's Eve!

2009 was a very successful year for Smashing Magazine. It was a year of ambitious goals and an intense time schedule, which brought many changes over the past year. In 2009 we published more posts than ever (on average, 8 posts per week). We broadened our areas of interest: for instance, we explored freelancing and the business side of web development, but also tackled user interface design and mobile web design. We also discovered new formats, such as the "Global Web Design" series and Q&A-Sessions — unfortunately, the latter (the Ask SM series with Chris Coyier) lasted only a couple of months.

We have tried our best to improve the quality of our articles so as to increase their value for designers and developers. In this post, we'll review what has happened on Smashing Magazine over the past year: smashing highlights, setbacks, and small sensations of 2009 — which we present in a month by month timeline. You can compare the highlights of 2009 with those of 2008 or 2007 (which, by the way, include links to some really useful articles).

Today we are glad to release something extremely tasty — Yummy Icon Set, a set with 20 beautiful, original and sweet icons in resolutions 48×48px – 128×128px and formats .png, .ico, .incs and .tif. Also, the vector source (.eps) is available for free download as well. This set was designed by our friends Iconeden and released 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. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

As designers, we're all trying to get better at what we do. We surf the Web daily for hours trying to find useful tips and tricks to enhance our design skills. But what if we spent less time surfing the Web looking for inspiration and more time creating and designing things?

Someone once said, "Practice makes perfect". While that statement might not be completely true, I do believe that practice makes you better. That is why in this blog post, I would like to propose something to every designer: Why not try to design something every day for one year?

Actors rehearse their lines until they learn them perfectly. Musicians practice their songs until every note is just right. Athletes practice their particular sport so they can excel. As designers, why can't we do the same? Ask any successful designer in the community about how they have succeeded and they will attribute much of their success to practice. I challenge you today to design something daily. Take fifteen to twenty minutes that you would normally use to surf the Web today and devote it to designing something.

Most of you are probably thinking that I am out of my mind for proposing this. How can you, as a designer working either for a company or for yourself, find the time to design something daily? More importantly, how will I come up with design ideas for a whole year's worth of projects? Well, to answer those questions, here are some practical tips.

There's very little to stop anyone becoming a freelancer. In a highly competitive and, in most places, saturated market, you need to make sure your reputation as a freelancer is well-managed and continues to grow. It's very possible to get a good reputation without being the best in the world, and it's even easier to lose that reputation.

In this article, we'll explore 15 habits that are essential in helping freelancers effectively safeguard and grow their reputation, and we'll also discuss how to make freelancing work for you. The habits are split into 3 sections:

• Marketing
• Business and time
• Specific business areas

In this post we release our last freebie for the Christmas and the New Year season: a beautiful Christmas and New Year's Eve WordPress Theme, designed by Site5.com and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme is decorated using Smashing Christmas Icon Set and its main goal is to give a blog a very festive, snowy, New Year's atmosphere. The theme has no particular requirements, except that the WordPress 2.8.5+ should be installed. As usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.

Download the theme for free! The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

The Christmas is coming and Christmas decorations are being prepared. However, it's not only time to spice up your living environment: your designs could use a bit of the Christmas spirit as well. A week ago our readers asked us to release a set of Christmas-related stock photos; so when a couple of days later Min Thu dropped us an e-mail suggesting to provide us with some Christmas stock photos, we just had to do it.

So, as requested, in this post we are glad to release Christmas Stock Photos Set, a set of 60 original Christmas-related photos in JPG in the resolution 2500×1666px. This set was created by Min Thu especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

As we move forward with the Web and browsers become capable of rendering more advanced code, we gradually get closer to the goal of universal standards across all platforms and computers. Not only will we have to spend less time making sure our box model looks right in IE6, but we create an atmosphere ripe for innovation and free of hacks and heavy front-end scripting.

The Web is an extremely adaptive environment and is surrounded by a collaborative community with a wealth of knowledge to share. If we collectively want to be able to have rounded corners, we make it happen. If we want to have multiple background images, we make it happen. If we want border images, we make that happen, too. So desire is not the issue. If it was, we would all still be using tables to lay out our pages and using heavy over-the-top code. We all know that anything can be done on the Web.

Designers spend hours perfecting websites, whether their own or their clients'. When you've invested anywhere from a few days to months in a website, the last thing you want is for someone else to steal the design without even giving you proper credit (or compensation). And if you're a template or theme designer, it's an even bigger problem. After all, if your templates are available online for free, a lot of people won't bother paying for them.

So what can you do if you've discovered that one of your designs has been ripped off? What should you do? Read on for a complete guide to steps you can take to protect your intellectual property.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I pretend to be one on TV, so the advice here should not be taken as legal advice. Before taking any of the actions mentioned below, check with a lawyer or other legal expert to see what is allowable in your state or country or to see if additional options are available to you.

Design is a fluid and shifting process in which layers are constantly modified and tweaked. As complexity builds, so does the need for preserving data in a flexible way. Learning non-destructive editing techniques helps you produce documents that bend along with your creativity. Photoshop Masks are the cornerstone of this process. Not only do they preserve important pixel data, but they allow for the creation of flexible interface elements as well. In this article, we'll explore the technical aspects and creative advantages of incorporating masks into your workflow.

Photoshop offers five methods of masking: Pixel Masks, Vector Masks, Quick Masks, Clipping Masks and Clipping Paths, all of which define pixel opacities without affecting the original data. Each of them has its own pros and cons, and knowing which method to use is extremely important for creating clean, flexible and properly masked layers.

In our last article about CSS3, "Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3, we talked about using new CSS3 techniques like gradients, border-radius and drop-shadows to create compelling, flexible and (in some cases) hilarious buttons. In this second article we're going to focus on using those CSS techniques (and a little JavaScript) to create some practical elements and layouts.

As before, caveat coder — a lot of the CSS properties we're going to use have limited support, if any, in IE6/7 and probably 8. Firefox 3.5+ and Safari 4 are your best bet right now to see all the cool stuff going on in CSS right now (Chrome does a pretty good job, too). Why bother with CSS that has such limited support? It won't always have limited support, and these articles are all about preparing for the future of web design (and just doing some really cool stuff). Ready? Let's roll.

Round-ups of beautiful and useful icons are almost legendary here, on Smashing Magazine. While some readers complain about the annoying "list"-style of some of our articles, we are confident that useful round-ups of relevant resources are very valuable and useful for designers. This is why over months we collect useful links and then present them in posts in the magazine. Like it or hate it, but the feedback that we get from the design community when we publish such posts is mostly positive which is why we keep doing it.

This round-up covers 50 beautiful and useful icons that may turn out to be life-savers for your next design. We present photorealistic icons, mini icons and pictograms, symbols and signs, free templates as well as Christmas icon sets and desktop replacement icons. Please make sure to read the license agreements before using the icons – they may change from time to time. Did you find this post useful? Would you like to see more similar posts in the future? Let us know in the comments to this post!

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Fresh Free High Quailty Icon Sets
• 50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design
• 50 Free High-Quality Icon Sets

Two weeks ago we published the first part of this article, covering multiple column content techniques and associating pages with post content; we discussed how to use the "More"-tag, hide standalone categories from the category list and retain the page layout for post views within a category page. This article presents the second part of the article; it covers customizing basic content administration and adding features to the post and page editor in WordPress. You would like to see more similar articles in the future? Let us know in the comments to this post!

Many template developers have learned the art of making beautiful, highly customized front end templates for WordPress. But the real wizards know how to tailor the WordPress administrative console to create a tailored, customized experience for content managers. The dashboard is the first screen presented to registered visitors when they visit WordPress administration (/wp-admin). Tailoring the dashboard to a client can be the difference between a great first impression and a confused one, particularly if the theme customizes the administrative experience.

Collage is the combination of pieces of diverse materials and media, such as newspaper, magazines, package labels, fabric, paint and photographs, into one composition. The term itself derives from the French "coller," meaning "glue." It was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at the beginning of the 20th century, when collage became a distinct part of modern art.

Collage promises to be an important creative outlet for many years to come because it allows artists to explore and experiment with creating truly new, exciting and often unexpected results. This article showcases the pioneers of the collage movement, current trends and examples, contemporary proponents of collage and a wealth of resources. Please feel free to use the comments area to suggest other collages or artists you like.

This post is the third article of our new series “Global Web Design“. Throughout this series we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look at what's happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started with Russian web design and Web Design in Ireland. We continue now with Mexico and next week with Israel. If you would like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us so we can discuss the details.

Land of tequila and mariachi, home of Chichén Itza (one of the new seven wonders of the world), amazing beaches, cheerful people, beautiful women... and last but not least, inspirational and creative Web designs for the entire world. Ours is a great country, with more than 110 million inhabitants, over 30% of which to date are connected to the Web.

Design has always been integral to our culture: the majestic pyramids built by the Aztecs; the numeric symbol "zero" created by the Mayans (who, by the way, were the architects of the great Chichén Itza); the colonial buildings influenced by the Spaniards and French; beautiful paintings by well-known artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; and now today’s great architects and artists, design firms, interactive agencies and software engineers.

To gain greater insight into Web design happening in Mexico today, we interviewed many people in the industry: freelancers, digital marketing managers, creative interactive agency reps and a few bloggers.