Textures have become more popular and been put to greater use in recent years. They’re not limited to Web design either; textures of all kinds are used in print design, illustration, traditional art, TV commercials… you name it! Texture is one of the best ways to add depth to your design, whether it’s subtle noise on a clean vector illustration or a lot of grunginess throughout a layout.
Over the last weeks we collected numerous examples of beautiful textured Web designs to inspire you, followed by a small collection of links to help you get started in using textures in your own designs.
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Inspiration is vital for any designer. This is why so many CSS galleries, design galleries and artistic showcases are floating around on the Web. Designers use these at certain times for a quick fix of inspiration, especially when the pressure of deadlines prevent them from seeking out offline, or “alternative,” forms of inspiration, as important as they are.
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Ireland. The land of the leprechauns, green fields and Guinness. But what about the web industry in Ireland? There have been a host of interesting things happening both North and South of Ireland recently. Nicholas Felton talked in Belfast, Ze Frank talked in Dublin, FOWA came to Dublin for the first time and FOWD came to Belfast. Are all these high profile events an indication that there are exciting things happening throughout Ireland?
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This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design”. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia.
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Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. “Buy this now!”) or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. “Learn more…”) that asks the user to take action.
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If you’ve been assigned to design or provide the architecture for a large e-commerce project or other information-heavy website whose success depends on content findability, it is vital that the design and layout of the search functionality for that website is considered carefully.
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Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.
Though iPhone’s Safari browser is able to render any website just like you would see it on a desktop browser, the available screen area is much smaller than in common “classic” displays. This poses a new challenge for designers and developers who now can reach millions of users that use mobile Web. Websites that are specifically optimized for the iPhone utilize the screen to the fullest extent, and use less bandwidth (which is necessary, because the connectivity is not always optimal).
The iPhone browsing experience is quite different than the regular browsing experience. The buttons and hyperlinks have to be bigger because our fingers are not as sharp as the mouse pointer. Optimizing a website for iPhone is not rocket science. It’s the same HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you already know. The only major difference is the screen size.
In the showcase below we present some of the interesting, interactive and beautiful designs that are optimized for the iPhone. You will also learn about some handy iPhone development tools and resources that will help you optimize your website for the iPhone.
Also consider our previous articles:
* How to Create Your First iPhone Application
* iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals
* 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers”)
[](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/06/100-really-beautiful-iphone-wallpapers/ “100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers”)
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Portfolio websites are critical for designers who want to get exposure for their work and attract new clients. While all portfolio sites will showcase the work of the designer, some have chosen to provide additional information about the project through case studies.
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The time has come for the first showcase of music night club websites here on Smashing Magazine. We’ve scanned the Web up and down to find the most original and interesting online club identities. As usual, we have Flash websites and CSS eye candy. Please notice that the aim of the post was to showcase current web designs of music night clubs, so the gallery doesn’t necessarily showcase most usable or most beautiful night club web designs out there.
As we observed in the early Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops, the most obvious trend is the use of big bold pictures, either as backgrounds, headers or just side graphic elements thrown in the design mix. Most of them start playing music automatically (which is extremely annoying from the usability point of view), but in this case it’s not weird or off-putting because they are music club websites after all.
Another trend is the use of bright, vivid colors and intense color schemes, borrowed from the clubs themselves. Also, Flash clearly dominates in such web-sites, presenting some very unconventional navigation menus and very distinctive layouts that aren’t intuitive at all at the first glance.
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The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design. It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to facilitate content browsing. The dominance of horizontal navigation over vertical (i.e. down a sidebar) is obviously due to the design and content limitations of the latter.
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