Cheap Website Design Blog

<!– –>

Stop motion animation is one of the hottest areas of film-making today. Stop motion is an animation art through which one can spring life in inanimate things and do the unnatural. It works by shooting a single frame of an object, then moving the object slightly, and then shooting another frame. When the film runs continuously in a film projector, or other video playback system, the illusion of fluid motion is created and the objects appear to move by themselves. This is similar to the animation of cartoons, but using real objects instead of drawings.

Well, how can you make use of stop motion in web design? Some design agencies integrate stop motion in their showreels, some may use it to present a product or a service. The main advantage of the technique is that it really looks different, unusual and therefore memorable. In technical terms, stop motion consists of many forms according to techniques used to create, animate and film it – pixilation, cutout animation, time-lapse, clay animation and many more. Stop motion animation is time-consuming, repetitive process which requires patience.

Below we present over 50 amazing examples of stop motion videos, a tribute to hard work of animators, artists and creative folks.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 30 Unforgettable Movie Title Sequences
• Typography in Motion Video Showcase
• Graphics In Motion Video Showcase
• 29 Brilliant Music Videos
• 60 Beautiful Music Videos
  

Agile Carousel is a feature-rich jQuery plugin for creating attractive image sliders.
With a bunch of options to customize the slider, and it can be used with or without jQuery UI for more effects, the plugin provides total control.

From a folder mentioned, it gets the images via PHP (not Ajaxed).
Some controls it has are:

Prev-next button options
Enable-disable [...]

<!– –>

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 which wallpapers have we received for January 2009?

PXtoEM.com is a website that makes converting PX values to EM values easier.

Conversions are based on 16px browser default size & you simply:

Select your body font size
And get the conversion
Or, manually enter PX or EM values to get custom conversions.

The CSS file of the values you’ve choosen can be get based on the typography.css portion of [...]

Pandora FMS is an open source application that can be used to monitor anything online like:

if a website is up or down
if the content of a website is changed (deface control or when value of a stock changes..)
diskspace or CPU usage of a remote server (via SNMP or TCP/IP)
& many more..

Pandora FMS can run on any [...]

<!– –>

The start of a new year is often a time of reflection on the past year, both personally and professionally, as well as a time to look forward to the year ahead. With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to do a New Year’s group interview with a number of top designers and developers. We put together a big list of questions and posed two in particular to each of the participants.

We think you’ll enjoy the insight this panel provides into 2008 and 2009. There’s a wide variety of topics covered, including favorite resources, trend predictions, business lessons learned, upcoming events for 2009 and more. Let’s take a look at a large group interview with top web designers that takes a look back on 2008 and presents some predictions for the year 2009.

Simple Directory Listing is a PHP script that works as an online file manager.
It is only one file, just upload & use, and requires PHP to run.

The script can work in read-only or full mode and can be limited to manage a folder.
Besides the functions of a standard file manager script, it also has a FTP layer [...]

<!– –>

We are definitely not Santa Claus, but we love to release high-quality sets and themes for free. And, of course, we do have some beautiful and unusual and (hopefully) useful presents for the upcoming New Year’s Eve.

Today we are glad to release three icon sets, one Photoshop brushes set and one exclusive WordPress-theme. A couple of more presents will be released over the next days. Happy New Year, folks!

Blender is an open source 3D content creation suite.
It is an all-in-one package for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming.

User interface of Blender is formed of boxes, where all of them can be moved for the max. flexibility for not being blocked by the UI.
Advanced animations & the integrated game engine can be controlled [...]

<!– –>

Comics aren’t just for children, as some people might think. There are many comics written with adults in mind, and this is reflected in the depth and scope of the artwork. Comic strips are widely read around the world in newspapers, magazines, books and the internet. Some are created simply to make people laugh, some are made to entertain (often with storylines worthy of a novel) and there are some that make political or social commentary.

Comic strips have a surprisingly long and interesting history. For instance, there’s evidence of comics in China from as long ago as the 11th century BC! Comics have evolved over the years with advances in technology and the changing styles of art and graphic design, and are often at the cutting edge of design.

The culture of an artist’s country is often a big influence on their work, and consequently comic styles are different around the world. We present you over 50 examples of beautiful comic strip artwork, from places as diverse as America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Some interesting articles and resources are listed at the bottom of the post.

You may be interested in the following related showcases:

• Showcase Of Brilliant Comic Book Cover Art
• Beautiful Examples Of Moleskine Art
• Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy
• Tribute To Graffiti: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks