CREATExCHANGE

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Every now and again we showcase beautiful favicons — tiny pieces of art you’ll usually find in your browser’s address bar or when searching through your bookmarks. Favicons are important as they provide visual indicators to visitors and help them to easily associate the content with a bookmark in their browser. Besides, favicons are just nice to look at and there are way too many sites which don’t make use of them. We like to change things. Which is why here is the 8th episode of the favicons series. For a change a small article with very small images and a quick loading time.

Please notice that the favicons weren’t chosen simply because of their beauty; it’s been important to us that the favicon perfectly fits to the overall site design. Pay close attention to the small details of the design. All favicons are linked to the sites where they are used — you can click on them to get more insights into how favicon design can be related to the layout design. All favicons are listed without a particular order. All images are linked - of course, if the page that contained the favicon still exists.

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Today we are glad to release Dellifeed Icon Set, a set with 8 tasty and appealing social icons in the format .png. This set was designed by Dellustrations.com especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons perfectly fit to the coming Christmas atmosphere and there is also always a reason to offer the readers of your blog a delicious RSS-cake icon!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

You may want to take a look at the following related freebies released on Smashing Magazine earlier:

• Feed Me Animals Icon Set
• RSS/Feed Icons
• Smashy The Alien Icon Set
• Cheers: A Free Social Icon Set

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Today we are glad to release Office Mouse Icons Set, a set of 15 unique icons, in .png and in the resolution 128×128px. The icons are designed by Niki Brown, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

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Today we are glad to release Swirls Illustrations Set, a sets of 10 high-quality vector illustrations, created with Adobe Illustrator and available as .eps source files. These illustrations were created by Designious.com and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Black Magic — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 2 columns and is based on grungy wooden textures and has a cool top menu which includes RSS. The psd source file of the logo has also been included in the package. This can be used for any projects and will be useful especially for portfolios. The theme was designed by Gopal Raju especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Today we are glad to release DressUp! Avatars Icon Set, a set with 16 original avatar icons in .png. This set was designed by Dante Michael Afrondoza especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set was created from scratch using Adobe Fireworks — the .png-sources are available for free download as well. The icons are available in 128×128px.

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Another day — another fresh freebie. Today we are glad to release The Graphs, a free icon set with 18 various graphs in the formats .png and .max (3D Studio Max). This set was designed by Goce Mitevski especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

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Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 50 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe and sent to us by the designers themselves. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded and used for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked 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. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for November?

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We are offering you the opportunity to showcase your work in our magazine by releasing a high-quality freebie. We try to keep high standards and we have high expectations because we want our readers to really see what you, as a designer, are capable of, what one can learn from you and why you should be hired. Average freebies usually get average publicity: we want you to get the best publicity and the biggest exposure from our magazine. Therefore, we want your work to stand out. Please contact us if you want to feature your work in our magazine.

Many designers take advantage of this opportunity; in fact, we are receiving more and more emails regarding freebie releases. Please note that we can’t answer all emails, but we read each of them. However, to get featured on Smashing Magazine, you really need to show us something that makes you different than the “usual” crowd.

Today, we are glad to release Color Paper: a free professional Wordpress theme, created by the DreamTemplate team. This theme aims to combine visual appeal with clean typography and vivid design elements. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Another day — another fresh freebie. Today we are glad to release Feed Me Animals: A Free RSS Feed Vector Icon Set, designed by Mirjami Manninen especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

This set contains 5 original RSS-feed icons. The icons are available in in .png, .jpg, .eps and .psd.

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As the Halloween is approaching, it’s best time to spice up your design with some quick Halloweenish icons. And since we are, apparently, smashing and the Halloween is all about pumpkins, we are glad to release Smashing Pumpkins: A Free Halloween Vector Icon Set.

This set includes 14 exclusive Halloween icons (.png, up to 512×512px) as well as vector sources (.ai CS3 file and .eps file), so you can modify and scale them as you wish. This set was created by Mirjami Manninen especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Another day — another fresh freebie. Today we are glad to release Hearting Social Icon Set, a set of 22 social icons in .png and in resolutions 16×16, 32×32, 64×64.

This set was designed by Aravind Ajith, the creator of TheDesignSuperHero.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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There are things one can do a number of times without worrying about becoming boring. For instance, collecting and showcasing excellent blog designs. In this post we do it already the fifth time. Why? Web design lives in blogs; new developments appear there, that’s where the music plays. And that’s where you need to look for in order to keep up with current trends and developments.

In the showcase below we present 50 beautiful blog designs that literally stand out — either through their layout or through their design or through their attention to little details. Below you’ll find a variety of designs: clean designs, grunge, retro, graphics-heavy designs etc. Most designs presented below risk unusual approaches in the choice of design and content presentation. That’s what makes them different. Hopefully you will find some creative ideas which you can develop further in your further projects.

We strongly encourage designers to break out the common layout conventions, experiment with new approaches and risk crazy ideas. Show what you are capable of!

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• Excellent Blog Designs: Part 1
• Excellent Blog Designs: Part 2
• Excellent Blog Designs: Part 3
• Excellent Blog Designs: Part 4

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More than quick sketches and drawings, Moleskine art can encompass mixed media and even digital art. The imperfect lines, smudges and wrinkles give it dimension and raw honesty that more than ever are sought by digital artists and implemented in software. Regardless of any advancement in technology, pen and paper will always be the number once choice for any budding artist or seasoned illustrator.

No theme or medium is ever neglected for the Moleskine treatment if the mood strikes the artist, spawning art like no other. With abstracts, travel themes and even other-worldly monsters, this collection of Moleskine art sketches and drawings is sure to inspire thought and spark your muse. Below you will find diverse styles created for a medium that refuses to die.

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Another day — another fresh freebie. Today we are glad to release Splatter and Watercolour Photoshop Brushes, 3 sets of 21 high-quality brushes, with the average size of 2500px or 2200px. These brushes were created for Adobe Photoshop CS, CS2 and CS3 and also work with GIMP 2.4.

The sets are created by Abdullah, the creator of Qbrushes.com where you can find further high-quality Photoshop brushes available for free download. This set was designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we try to do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Cellar Heat — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Evan Eckard. This theme was designed with the main focus being on patterns and typography and comes in 2 flavours. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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In the realm of digital art, so many wonderful and playful genres exist that stimulate the imagination, but so few do it with the intricate style of fractal art. Fractal art is achieved through the mathematical calculations of fractal objects being visually displayed, with the use of self-similar transforms that are generated and manipulated with different assigned geometric properties to produce multiple variations of the shape in continually reducing patterns. Sounds extremely technical and not that artistic, true, but these equations create some of the most mesmerizing and inspiring artwork to emerge from the digital art arena.

In this post we look at awe-inspiring examples of the dynamic digital art sensation that is fractal art with 35 Phenomenal Fractal Art Renders. Setting across the vast sea of cyberspace to find these works was such an amazing task as so many fantastic pieces surfaced. Here are scaled-down versions of some of the most breathtaking ones that were uncovered, though the full-sized versions (linked through the image) offer a much more spectacular view of these mathematical masterpieces.

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Last week we announced a books giveaway (the page take minutes to load) — we were giving away 10 professional web design-related books that cover the topics CSS, usability, user interface design, innovation, web navigation, web form design and JavaScript programming.

We genuinely appreciate our community and respect our readers for reading us, and now we wanted to give something back. Over 3,500 readers participated in the giveaway. And the winners are now announced in this post.

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In our previous releases we focused on icons and Wordpress themes; however, there is a variety of further tools that graphic designers need on a regular basis; for instance, vector graphics. You can find dozens of our other releases in our Freebies section.

Today we are glad to release Swirls, Flowers and Circles, a vector graphics set designed by Pien Duijverman from Netherlands. The vector graphics can be downloaded for free and is available in formats AI (Adobe Illustrator CS3) and EPS (8.0).

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Today is the Blog Action Day. Today bloggers all across the globe unite and publish posts that are related to poverty. We want to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause. Smashing Magazine strongly believes that together we can make a difference by informing people about the problem and donating money to charity organizations.

We considered various options for this post: we could showcase designs or posters related to poverty, or we could scour the Web for poverty-related icons and wallpapers. But we decided to do something different. We decided to prove that each of us can help to make the poverty history.

For this purpose we collected beautiful portraits of children who lived in poverty and are now supported by charity organizations. These photos were shot by photographers, photojournalists and organizations that try to improve the conditions of children in poor countries. The money these organizations raised, gave these children hope and future, something to rely on and something to believe in. There are millions of children out there who need your help. And you can help them by donating to the Global Fund and donating to Kiva.

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Movie posters are art and, unfortunately, the forgotten one. In the early years of cinema history, they were used just like advertising material. Displayed in theatres only, movie posters had the same function as a menu in a restaurant: what feast can I enjoy this evening? Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collection. They have lost the “informative” tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. We want to change it with this post.

Made in many different sizes and versions, and released in different moments all along a movie’s life, posters immortalize in one static image the feeling and the atmosphere of a motion picture. Some posters can be dark or try to frighten the audience, others bedazzling with bright colors; some can be someway informative, while others can be fully teasing and may provide you only the date when movie will be released, even if you may not know what the movie is about.

In this post we present you a showcase of 50 beautiful movie posters. We went trought different decades of movie history and different genre, different graphical approach, colors and style. Movies the posters are about may be famous or not, this is not the point.

Movie posters put together the love for for two different visual arts: cinema and graphics. Enjoy!

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Let’s face it. Some days, you want to just fire your clients. You go through one too many comps, iterations or edits and you’ve had enough. It has happened to everyone at least once and I’d be lying if I said it won’t happen again; you get to the end of a project and realize that you would have made more per hour flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

Thankfully, as with most common problems, there are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to help make sure that you’re never working for below minimum wage.

Remember that the client will always know more about their product or service than you do. They are the expert at what they do; their problem is usually that they don’t know how to explain it well. That is where you, as the designer, step in to help. You are a graphical communications ninja, but to effectively make your, and ultimately your client’s, point you must fully understand what needs to be said.

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We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release Fresh: an application and financial icon set. This set contains 59 raster and vector icons, designed by Icon Eden, the creators of the Bright Icon Set and the Milky Icon Set . The set includes icons in .png, .icns and .ico-formats. An .EPS vector file is available as well. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

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As you may or may not know, we like to smash things. Apart from releasing free icons, themes and wallpapers, every now and again we pick a dozen of professional design and web-development-books, buy them and give them away to our readers — for free, of course. We genuinely appreciate our community and respect our readers for reading us, and now we are giving something back.

In this post we are giving away 10 professional web design-related books — the books cover the topics CSS, usability, user interface design, innovation, web navigation, web form design and JavaScript programming. Hopefully, the winners of the books will be able to widen their horizon in web development and create more effective, more user-friendly and more beautiful web designs.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed — more giveaways are planned in the near future.

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Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying “old-style” elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different. As a matter of fact, if executed carefully, such designs almost never look boring, although one might intuitively think that the opposite would be the case.

Retro and vintage designs exhibit graphic solutions that are strongly influenced by the time period that they are supposed to represent. While retro focuses on the style of the 1910s to 1930s, vintage recalls the time period between the 1950s and 1980s. In both cases, design elements reflect some old-fashioned motifs, trends, personalities and objects that had been an essential part of our lives in the past.

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We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release The Leaf Fall: a social icon set. This set contains 12 social icons, designed in an autumn-style. The set includes icons for Twitter, Technorati, RSS, Reddit, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in the .png-format in various resolutions. This icon set is intended to be used by bloggers. It was designed by Templates.com, especially by Julia Agnes, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.

In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.

Today we are glad to release The DelliPack 2! icon set. This second set of “delicious icons” contains 15 icons: a build icon, a home icon, an interact icon, a monitor icon, a pen icon, a phone book icon and other icons which can be useful for both corporate and personal projects. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever. You can also take a look at the Dellipack 1: A Free Icon Set

The icons are available in the .png-format in the resolutions 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px. This icon set was designed by Wendell Fernandes and is now released as a gift for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Simply Ornate — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Evan Eckard. This theme was designed with the main focus being on patterns and typography and comes in 5 flavours. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 40 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked 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. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for October?