Design

Illustrator and graphic designer

… the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet

a bookmarklet for typographically obsessed web designers. It enables rapid checking of fonts and font styles directly in the browser without editing code and refreshing pages. 2.0’s killer feature is instant drag-and-drop font previewing right in the browser (Firefox 3.6+ only), in any document you’re currently viewing.

Take a look around any online marketplace and you’ll see the labor of designers, writers, and digital artists severely undervalued.

Here, you’ll find 40 of the most incredibly well designed vintage web sites. In reality, of course, they’re only vintage at the most superficial of levels. Peel back the vintage veneer and you’ll find cutting edge web development and design processes have been employed.

… wireframing, mockups and prototyping for websites and applications

Wireframes on the fly … an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.

(about CSS performance)

Andrew Clarke shares a case study highlighting the benefits of progressively enhanced web design. Ever wondered how to convince your clients to let you use cutting edge web techniques? It may be simpler than you think.

»We aren’t designing copies of web pages, we’re designing web pages.«

… a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies.

Designers spend hours perfecting websites, whether their own or their clients’.

In our last article about CSS3, ["Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/02/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.

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.

«[…] here are 24 total resources that will show you how to design and code Wordpress themes from scratch. This includes 9 design and coding tutorials, 12 Photoshop mockups, 2 Wordpress e-books, and even a developers “Cheat Sheet”.»

The studio of Albert Exergian is specialized in visual communication utilising art direction and graphic design. The roster of clients includes international companies as well as independent businesses.

Direction, Design & Motion

Drew McLellan kicks off our 2009 season with a look at some of the tools CSS3 provides for applying levels of transparency to colour values, enabling you to avoid weighing down a site design with heavy PNG images.

A beautiful, brand new blog theme based on Subtraction.com, designed by Allan Cole and myself.

Let's look at some clever techniques developed and used by top professionals in the Web design industry. We can use their examples to develop our own alternative solutions.