It’s been nine years already since we embarked on this mission to welcome the new month with a fresh batch of desktop eye candy, with wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd. And it wasn’t any different this time around. July is almost here, and artists and designers from across the globe once again challenged their creative skills and created a lovely collection of wallpapers for July 2017. All of them come in two versions and can be downloaded for free. Now you only need to decide which one will make it to your desktop. Enjoy!
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
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As an educator, Alma Hoffmann has learned that one of the most challenging aspects for an aspiring left-hand letterer is to apply everything that a right-handed person is teaching. It is almost like doing mental gymnastics. In this article, she will help you get started with the fundamentals of lettering with the left hand: the position and placement of the arm and wrist, the position of the paper, and holding the tool (brush pens). Alma will share theoretical as well as practical advice, demonstrating some points using her student Talondra Keeton, who is left-handed, to create lettering. She started back in January, and throughout the semester she has been consistently improving. Let’s get started.
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Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites.
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Today, we’d like to share an icon set dedicated to a well-known upcoming American holiday. Designed by the creative folks at Vecteezy, this freebie contains 20 illustrations of some lovely things that shouldn’t be left out on this particular holiday. All icons are available in four formats so you can resize and customize them until they match your project’s visual style perfectly. Happy 4th of July to those who celebrate!
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Humor is an important aspect of life. It has many positive benefits, like reducing stress, increasing psychological well being and increasing tolerance for pain. Humor is integral and inherent to human relationships. You can use humor in your design to create a positive user experience. We want to develop positive relationships with our users — humor can help make that happen. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you that you can incorporate humor in your design, maintain your brand identity and not look like you are trying too hard in the process.
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As digital and offline experiences got more intertwined, new interactive advertising formats emerged, with a promise to capture the most scarce and valuable marketing asset of all — people’s attention. The latest mobile trends show promise that publishers and advertisers are getting smarter about the user experience. Google is working to recapture lost attention with a crackdown on mobile pop-ups, and marketers are easing off of aggressive acquisition strategies to focus on retention. In this article, Anya Pratskevich will look at some of the biggest trends in mobile marketing.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Our industry thrives on constant, aggressive development, and new technologies emerge on a regular basis that change the way we do things in fundamental ways. Much of what we know of the possibilities, limitations and best practices surrounding web layouts is effectively rendered obsolete by the CSS Grid Layout module. In this article, Morten Rand-Hendriksen will bring you some concepts into practical use. What you’ll get is a starting point for exploring what new layout opportunities and challenges CSS grid brings, what old problems it solves and how to start using the module in production websites today.
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