Cheap Website Design Blog

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Using reflections in photography can lead to some amazing effects and beautiful images. Using water, windows, mirrors or any sort of reflective surface can change an image into a work of art. The wonderful thing about using reflections when taking photos is that they can completely alter the image from something fairly straightforward to something richer or abstract or otherwise more artistic.

Sometimes reflections can be annoying and certainly not artistic. But creativity and good-quality photos depend on the photographer being able to see things differently, rather than seeing only one part of a larger whole. Also, using reflected light can vastly improve the quality of lighting available. Diffused light is generally better for taking photos, and using reflected light, either as the main source of light or for highlighting, is an excellent way to capture diffused light.

Whether you choose to use reflection in an artistic way or as a source of lightning, learning to use reflections in photography will help take your photographic skills to the next level.

Below we present over 50 beautiful examples of reflective photography. All examples are linked to their sources. Below, you can also explore other works of the photographers we’ve featured here.

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

• 35 Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography
• 45 Beautiful Motion-Blur Photos
• Beautiful Black-and-White Photography
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures

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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 55 free December 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 have we received for December?

ecommr is a website presenting interface & design elements of e-commerce websites in a well-categorized way.
Besides the element categories, designs can be reached by retailer names too ( for ex: you can simply focus on the design elements of Apple Shop).

It has a growing collection of elements like:

add to cart buttons
banners
product detail pages
shopping carts [...]

Server2Go is a portable web server environment built to be used in CD-ROMS, memory sticks & similar portable media.
It has almost everything you need to run a web application:

Apache 1.3.x, 2.0.x and 2.2.x
PHP 5.2.x with a lot of extensions. Downgrade packages to 4.4.x and 5.0.x available)
MySQL 5 support
Perl 5.8 with many CPAN modules integrated

Server2Go auto-configures [...]

Seadragon is a technology, by Microsoft, for deeply zooming images of any size. It provides almost perfect transitions independent from the sizes of the images.
Seadragon Ajax is an interface for using/embedding this technology to any website.

Seadragon can be used in 2 ways:

By uploading images to Photozoom & use Embed Builder
Compose a deep zoom image with [...]

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From Rudolph Töpffer and Wilhelm Bush’s precursors to modern-day incarnations, comics have been a large part of popular culture for generations. Growing over the ages through contributions to the genre from Christophe Chabouté, Angelo Agostini and, of course, Richard Outcault, this then-revolutionary new way for artists to create and deliver a narrative exploded throughout the art world, leaving a lasting mark that would mature over the years, morphing into a mainstream artistic medium. Today, with a more stylized focus on heroic tales and dark worlds beyond the imagination, this genre continuously churns out amazing artwork from some extremely talented artists.

In this inspirational installment, we look at some of the wonderful works over the years that have graced the covers of comics — art that has delighted and dazzled fans and non-fans alike from shelves and displays across the globe, the kind of works that tempt those not usually taken by this genre to give it another look or to pick up a book for the first time. We feel these impressive feats that draw this kind of attention and inspire this kind of adoration deserve a showcase, so we proudly present examples of brilliant comic book cover art!

Grape is a simple open source web statistics application with a clean interface.
It can display several statistics information like:

Visits (unique & total)
Referrers
OS of the visitors
Spying on users
& more

There is an admin interface which allows you to add new statistics tracking extensions.
Statistics are stored in a MySQL database & can be queried for any time interval.
Grape [...]

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Often it is the close attention to small details that makes a design outstanding. During the development of a website, designers tend to quickly forget about small details and focus on major design elements, such as navigation, typography and layout. If done properly, the result is usually a solid, impressive and highly professional design that communicates information. However, it is not memorable. The reason is that such designs often do not have a memorable voice: they may look visually appealing, but they don’t provide a vivid anchor for users to remember a website after leaving it.

In this post, we showcase the design of “Back to top” links, a forgotten and rarely used link that helps users jump to the top of a given page. A visitor can achieve this effect by pressing the “Home” button on his or her keyboard; however, not every user is aware of that shortcut, and most probably use the vertical scroll bar in the browser for that purpose. As designers, we can help our users out by adding a stand-alone “top” link to our designs.

Visión is a simple image viewer script built with PHP.
It dynamically scans for the images in a folder specified, preloads & displays them within a good looking interface.

Preloading feature helps it to display images faster, on the other hand this makes the script more suitable for displaying limited number of images.
The script is cross-bowser compatible [...]

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Design portfolios come in various forms. Traditionally they have been print-based and something you would carry to a client pitch or meeting to showcase what you’ve done and how you do it. Today, many designers take advantage of the nature of the internet to publish and showcase their work via their online portfolios. Having your work displayed online removes the geographical restraints that traditional portfolios impose on you.

In this showcase, you’ll find a variety of beautiful, unique, and highly-creative portfolio designs. The aim here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire you to create your own portfolio or re-think your existing one. You’ll get to see portfolios from a wide range of fields including web design, product design, illustration, photography, and even animation. Without further ado, we present to you 50 beautiful and creative portfolio designs.

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

• Creating A Successful Online Portfolio
  In this article we’ll review 5 pitfalls that commonly plague portfolio design. Then we’ll cover Portfolio Tips that if carefully considered and well executed will deliver quality results for your portfolio.