As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one: distinctive desktop wallpapers. This article features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for December 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop wallpaper!
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In this article, we feature a set of 54 flat icons created and designed by Nick Frost and Greg Lapin. If you are looking for a way to make your design fresh and expressive, then this freebie is the answer. It includes 36 icons drawn from a full commercial set available on Smallicons, plus 18 icons designed exclusively for Smashing Magazine.
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Today, Vitaly Friedman reveals the Smashing Book Mystery riddle and announces the winners! (in case you want to figure it out first, close this window since there are spoilers in this post.
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95% of downloaded apps are abandoned within a month and 26% of apps are only used once, and depending on the user, these abandoned apps are deleted or ignored, never to be opened again. Lyndon Cerejo’s app graveyard is the final resting place for apps that he has downloaded but have since left neglected. The following are lessons from his app graveyard that he keeps in mind when designing apps, and they might help you, too.
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To celebrate the long-awaited release of our new Smashing Book (yaaaay!), we’ve prepared a little mystery for you. Below you’ll find an animated GIF that contains a hidden message. Once you resolved the mystery, you’ll see a Twitter hashtag displayed in plain text. Are you ready? Action!
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Many large businesses had a chief electricity officer when electricity first started to power the industrial economy. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade after introducing electricity, many business leaders were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. They needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.
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In this article, Peter Traeg provides an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of the following approaches. Few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, and this series is intended to broaden your scope. Hopefully you will be in a better position to choose the right development tools for your mobile application’s needs!
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You want to be lean and you want to be agile by using technologies that will help you succeed in the short and long term. And those technologies are not always easy to pick out. Full-stack JavaScript hits all the marks. You’ve probably seen it around. With JavaScript, you can create scalable, maintainable applications, unified under a single language. There’s no doubt, it’s a force to be reckoned with. In this article, Alejandro Hernandez will introduce these components piece by piece.
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If Wesley Hales asked you what could have been better at the last conference you attended, you’d probably say that the content or the interaction could have been better in some way. To solve this problem, he created Onslyde: A free service and open-source project that will make public speaking easier and conferences better. It’s been a lot of fun and work, and now you get to see the result!
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The best thing any designer can do is to collect feedback from real users. Recently, Joshua Gross had an opportunity to experience thiswhen iterating on HelloSign. Thanks to testing, the app went from four stars to a solid five stars after a redesign. You’ll look at how the app started, how they ran the tests and how the product ended up with five stars.
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