Smashing Magazine

For too many projects, there comes a time when every action taken, every decision and sacrifice made, is spurred on by pressure to finish. Tempers seem to shrink along with the available days, talk about “high standards” gives way to “good enough,” and people realize that deadlines are aptly named. During the last-minute crunch, someone may well wonder, how did it come to this? Could it have been prevented?

Every Web project has deadlines. But not every designer or developer deals with them the same way. Because a deadline marks the end of a project, everyone involved in the project must understand the deadline’s role. Most projects follow a schedule or have an estimated date by which they must be completed. The concept is simple then: when the work takes longer than expected, deadlines get missed.

Mastering Photoshop for Web Design is the third book in our eBook series, and it's definitely the best eBook we've published so far. It was written from scratch by our regular writer Thomas Giannattasio, exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. We are very proud of the result, in particular because of the high quality of tips, ideas and techniques that Thomas — who is a deep expert in Adobe Photoshop — presents in his book.

Mastering Photoshop is written for advanced and intermediate designers who want to brush up on their workflow and improve their Photoshop skills. The eBook contains 178 pages, explaining fundamental techniques that Web designers need to know to produce high-quality work in Photoshop. You won't find any generic step-by-step tutorials or learn random effects. You will gain a profound understanding of what you can do with Photoshop and how to use it effectively in your work.

An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run.

And this is where we come in. Back in old days, Smashing Magazine used to publish lists after lists, with plethora of links that covered different topics all somehow related to web design and development. We have undergone quite a development since then, and are now publishing almost only in-depth articles — written by some of the best professionals in the industry. However, useful, carefully prepared and filtered lists are still useful, and therefore we keep publishing them as well.

Below you'll find 50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers. Among other things, you will find recently released tools, useful reference sheets, articles and further resources. Such posts are prepared over months, each containing resources found, reviewed or bookmarked by the Smashing Editorial Team. We hope that at least some of them will help you improve your workflow!

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers
• 50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials
• 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires

Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is people — professionals and newbies alike — who make it truly remarkable. It’s the photographer behind the camera. It’s his imagination, passion and talent and knowledge of the medium. You don't need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent and a way of looking at things differently is together more than enough for a great shot. It's also the ability to envision the final result in your mind which is also important.

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. You can easily construct this camera by yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image on a photographic film or a CCD sensor.

In this post we release a free Facebook GUI PSD Kit, designed by SurgeWorks and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. As usual, the kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions.

The kit brings the Facebook vector icon and logo. Also, since the focus of this resource are the UI elements, it brings a main window with the header, menu and the chat window for you to set up your realistic mock-ups. Plus all the modal components, comment boxes, buttons, message boxes, tabs, etc. All the components are full layered, built using vectors and blending options, so that scaling and editing the objects will not be a problem.

Mark Rothko, an American artist who described himself as an "abstract painter", once said that he was not the kind of person interested in the relationship of form, color or similars. He didn't define himself as an abstractionist, but rather as a person interested only in expressing basic human emotions such as doom, tragedy, ecstasy and so on. This was one person's vision of art, but what do we mean by art today? Why is defining the concept so difficult?

This article is an exploration of the meaning of art and an attempt to understand the relationship between art and artists, with some useful insights via interviews with both traditional and digital artists.

Think of Tumblr as micro-blogging on steroids (technically, it's called "tumblelogging"). Whereas Twitter and similar services limit posts to 140 characters or less, Tumblr lets you post updates of any length, although it's best suited to short-format posts. Tumblr bridges the gap between full-blown blog and micro-blog.

Tumblr is also a great option for designers and creative types, because it gives you complete control over the look of your tumblelog. It also offers great opportunities for theme designers, especially with the recent launch of premium themes (which range in price from $9 to $49). Read on for your complete guide to using and designing for Tumblr.

A website is never done. Everyone has worked on a project that changed so much after it launched that they no longer wanted it in their portfolio. One way to help those who take over your projects is to produce a style guide.

Edward Tufte once said: "Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard." Although there's no stopping some clients from making their website awful, by creating a style guide, you're effectively establishing rules for those who take over from you.

Smashing Editorial: Please notice that the language in some parts of this article may be very informal. If you think you might be offended, please stop reading this article now.

I hate the division represented in this title. It’s the major stumbling block in modern business. Power struggle is never constructive, and it at least doubles workforce effort at a time when streamlined is crucial for a positive ROI. You can spell “team” from the word “marketing,” but I’ve yet to see a sense of it in marketing. What can one spell from “creative”? “Reactive”? I’ve seen plenty of that, and for good reason.

Don’t get me wrong: I love marketing as a practice! Relatively speaking, marketing is a fairly new practice (marketing in the sense of "public", broad mass marketing, applied to products in the modern age — ed.), and one that has to evolve each day to keep up with consumerism and technology. As a designer, coming up with marketing ideas is orgasmic. Guerilla, sabotage and viral marketing are the work of genius, which is why we don’t see them very often. But you are probably thinking horrid thoughts about marketing practitioners right now, so let’s rethink for a second.

Today we are glad to release CMS Icon Set, a set with 12 high quality icons in 48×48px, available in the .png-format. The set was designed to be used in content management systems, but can also be useful for other user interface designs. This goodie was designed by the Russian design studio Pixel-Mixer and released especially 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. The set may not be resold, sublicensed or rented. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

CSS3 continues to both excite and frustrate web designers and developers. We are excited about the possibilities that CSS3 brings, and the problems it will solve, but also frustrated by the lack of support in Internet Explorer 8. This article will demonstrate a technique that uses part of CSS3 that is also unsupported by Internet Explorer 8. However, it doesn't matter as one of the most useful places for this module is somewhere that does have a lot of support - small devices such as the iPhone, and Android devices.

In this article I'll explain how, with a few CSS rules, you can create an iPhone version of your site using CSS3, that will work now. We'll have a look at a very simple example and I'll also discuss the process of adding a small screen device stylesheet to my own site to show how easily we can add stylesheets for mobile devices to existing websites.

In previous video roundups, we've collected together some interesting videos and presentations from a variety of speakers discussing topics covering usability, graphic design, CSS frameworks, web standards, and more. In this small roundup, we've included seven videos that we think would be of great interest to web app developers in particular, with less focus on design and standards.

These presentations are a little more technically heavy than ones we've featured in the past, but we think they're worth every minute. Check them out, and be sure to comment to include links to any related videos that you feel are worth mentioning.

In the Web design scene, the sense of community is extremely strong. We always talk about "giving back" and about how much we learn from those who do. A few names are popular and dropped here and there. But it's all still just a bit too impersonal, isn't it? Here at Smashing Magazine, we've decided to give you a more intimate look at our writers.

Among the people who regularly write for us, 15 agreed to answer our questions. We also challenged them to take a picture of themselves on the spot, with no time for make-up. This interview is not meant to give you any particular professional insight, even though we cover that ground a bit. Rather, it's meant to introduce you to these people on a personal level. The illustrations for this article were created by Andrea Austoni, an illustrator from Poland who we are regularly working with.

The word chocolate can be associated with many words: dark, white, milk, hot, sweet, spicy, etc. But have you tried to combine it with the word web design? We did. We searched the Web for websites in any way related to chocolate and what we found is worth to be collected in this showcase. The interesting thing is that you would probably never stumble upon some of the sites, so the overview below may provide you with a unique perspective and get your creative juices flowing.

As one would expect, chocolate website often use an appetizing brown dominant color. If you take time to look at the panel of colors associated with it, you will find out that there is a lot of combination working really well. Apart from this component, each site is unique and features an original identity, depending on product presentation and given information.

You may be wondering why you're reading about the good old semantics on Smashing Magazine. Why doesn't this article deal with HTML5 or another fancy new language: anything but plain, clear, tired old semantics. You may even find the subject boring, being a devoted front-end developer. You don't need a lecture on semantics. You've done a good job keeping up with the Web these last 10 years, and you know pretty much all there is to know.

People looking for bananas might think twice before buying these.

I'm writing about HTML semantics because I've noticed that semantic values are often handled sloppily and are sometimes neglected, even today. A huge void remains in semantic consistency and clarity, begging to be filled. We need better and more consistent naming conventions and smarter ways to construct HTML templates, to give us more consistent, clearer and readable HTML code. If that doesn't sound like paradise, I don't know what does.

Today we are glad to release gCons, a set of free all-purpose 32×32px icons for designers and web developers (100 icons). The icons come in 12 different colors and are available in PSD, PNG, JPG and GIF formats. This set was designed by Sarfraz Shoukat especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use, Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

One thing that can be said about human beings is that we are, by and large, creatures of habit. We establish routines, consciously and subconsciously, that help us accomplish tasks or move us more quickly or comfortably through our day. Habits are formed in the design and development community just as they are in nearly every other professional and personal environment, and they serve any number of purposes. In design and development circles, one established habit is seen with the launch of a website or project.

Naturally, each of us has developed a process that we engage in as we wrap up a project, but a few procedures tend to be used over and over again by the masses. We know this because we ran a poll on this very topic on Twitter. We got many great responses, but the community tends towards a few common practices. We could see as we looked through the list of entries that certain wrap procedures seem to have mass appeal (judging by the number of times they were given as answers), so we began to examine the benefits they offered and what they say about those who fall back on them.

To get you really excited about CSS3, last month we announced the CSS3 Design Contest and encouraged designers to experiment and get creative with CSS3. As expected, we have received many creative and original submissions. To choose the winners of the contest, we considered the originality of the technique or approach and its uniqueness. The idea mattered more than the execution.

This process has taken a lot of time as it wasn't easy, because we received quite a few creative submissions: however, a decision had to be taken and so we thoroughly went from one competition entry to another. And the decision was made. So today, it's time to announce the winners and present the submissions to the contest.

Please notice that the contest results are experimental and may not necessarily look or work alike in different browsers. The techniques presented below should be considered as innovative, creative approaches showcasing what can be achieved with pure CSS3 and a bit of creative thinking. Please feel free to build upon these ideas to create further techniques and design solutions and make them available for the design community.

Sometimes, a picture can be powerful enough to be inspirational material all by itself. To provide you with some inspiration for the upcoming week, this sunday we feature some truly beautiful and impressive images from talented artists and photographers worldwide.

Whether in black and white or in colors, they are all related by a strong sense of composition and an emphasis on lightening and colors work. All images are linked to their sources, which you are encouraged to visit. Other work of the photographers we have featured here is certainly worth discovering as well. Please notice that some images are available as prints as well.