UI Design TW. Thu, 08/25/2011 | Co. Design. Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: September 2011 - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration.
This post features 25 free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2011. Please note that: All images can be clicked on 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. Flamingo Designed by Vlad Gerasimov from Russia. Colorful Apple "Green, unripe apple takes on juicy colors. " Lighthouse Designed by Mohd. Are You Ready For A Web Design Challenge? - Smashing Magazine - Aurora. Advertisement This is not a normal Smashing Magazine post. I’m not going to teach you something new or inspire you with examples of great work. Instead, I want to encourage you to complete a Web design challenge. I believe this will help to address a weakness that exists in many of our design processes. If you complete this challenge, it will make it easier for clients to sign off on your designs, and it will improve the quality of your work.
So, what are we waiting for? Let’s get started. The Challenge If you’re like me, you did some form of higher education in art and design and will know about “the crit.” These were terrifying meetings in which I justified my design approach and defended it against criticism. The ability to logically justify our designs is a skill many of us lack. My challenges is this: Write a blog post justifying the design approach you took to one of your websites. Admittedly, this might sound like a lot of effort, so let me explain why it is worth your while. Grid Color. Web Design And Development Community Treehouse Wants To Teach You How To Code, Get You A Job.
Fresh off a $600K round of seed funding, developer education startup Treehouse is launching to the public this morning, using videos, quizzes and badges to take ostensibly anyone from n00b to 1337 in months. Unlike Codeacademy and Lynda, Treehouse offers a breadth of expert-curated web design, development and iOS development topics (HTML, CSS Foundations, Technology Foundations, Aesthetic Foundations, Introduction to Programming, and others) and is already profitable as it charges users from $29 to $49 dollars a month to use its programs.
What also sets Treehouse apart from others in the space is that users win badges (see below) for getting five questions in a row correct on its quizzes or completing in-browser code challenges, with the objective of building out their public profiles at. The Principles of Experience Design. Whitney Hess is the cat’s meow in the web design world. She’s an independent user experience designer, consultant and prolific web logger based in New York City. Today, at the Future of Web Design, Hess took the stage to share a universally applicable set of experience design principles that designers should all strive to follow to take a site or product to the next level. Hess defines guiding principles as the broad philosophy or fundamental beliefs that steer an organization, team or individual’s decision making, irrespective of the project goals, constraints, or resources.
She first laid out the visual principles of design including harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, repetition, movement and texture. But, she says, creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience. Hess’s principles can be applied to both online and offline worlds. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. “There is no such thing as a perfect design. 9. 10. A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design. So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing. As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work.
I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is terrible. This matters, because visions matter. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what a tool is in the first place.
That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. That's right!