The word ‘bokeh’ derives from the Japanese for ‘blur’ or ‘haze’, and in photography describes the effect found in out-of-focus regions of images. Different lens designs, aperture shapes and sizes, and various depths of field have profound effects on the type and extent of bokeh produced in a photograph. Bokeh happens in the areas of an image beyond the depth of focus; by playing with focus and lens, photographers can create some stunning images.
This post brings together 25 examples of incredible bokeh photography, and concludes with a summary of great tutorials where you can learn bokeh techniques for yourself.
Bokeh Day. This image is an excellent example of bokeh, with the metallic effect on the bubbles and receding blur of lights offering a sense of depth and dimension. (via DW212)
Bokeh Butterfly. Bokeh photography can transport the viewer to an almost alien world of scale and color, such as this beautifully composed image of a butterfly. (via Aussiegall)
Cactus Needle Bokeh. This macro image of the miniscule hairs on a cactus uses an extremely narrow field of focus to achieve the sensual bokeh effect. (via Kevin Dooley)
Forget-me-not’s. Kevin Law’s bokeh image is another to take nature as its subject matter, with the pretty forget-me-nots’ summer blossoms set against the blurred greens of an English meadow. (via Kevin Law)
A Cup of Bokeh, Please. This superb shot juxtaposes a sharp focused mug against blurred lights for a touch of bubbling bokeh. (via Shermeee)
Sweet Disposition. Photographer Josh Liba likes to take portraits of this character called Yushi in various settings. In this case, she finds herself in a field of corn stubble at sunset, with a delightful combination of color and soft focus. (via Josh Liba)
The Smell of Bokeh. Niffty’s beautifully rendered photo captures the play of golden light on plants, cobwebs and sparkling dewdrops. (via Niffty)
When Bokeh and Alcohol Mix. A close-up shot of Christmas tree lights, using a quarter-second exposure, resulted in this colorful spiral. (via Robert S. Donovan)
Christmas. Another Christmas-themed bokeh shot that verges into the realms of abstraction, with lights reduced to discs of sublime color. (via Kevin Dooley)
Bokeh Spiral. Many of the spirals found in nature are based on the logarithmic principles of the Golden Section, such as the receding body of a plant as seen in this bokeh image. (via Eriwst)
Happy Bokeh Wednesday!. It took a lot of patience to achieve this image, but finally the photographer managed to capture the fine detail of a falling leaf’s desiccated flesh against the blurred autumnal colours of the background. (via Jesse Kruger)
Bokeh Snow Tree. Pink Sherbet’s atmospheric shot captures a blizzard blowing through the branches of a tree in Massachusetts, with the blurred snowflakes offering a sense of depth and movement. (via Pink Sherbet)
Typical Elbe Bokeh?. This maritime image uses bokeh effects to create a sense of scale and distance with the form of a freight-laden ship pleasingly blurring into the background. (via Eriwst)
Bokeh Mu’a. The feathered light in DucDigital’s bokeh photo has an ethereal, dream-like quality. (via DucDigital)
2009 Illuminate Yaletown. Bokeh photographs often feature greater blurring on lights that are further from the camera, sometimes producing startling geometric effects, such as this shot by Zen-Shooter. (via Zen-Shooter)
Lonely Night of Bokeh. The combination of blur, water, tonality and colouration in this image creates a melancholy yet alluring atmosphere. (via Studio494)
Bokeh!. This image was captured when the photographer visited Shivamogga, in the Indian state of Karnataka. The corrugated iron roof, rivulets of water and glistening, blurred vegetation are characteristic of the subcontinent’s monsoon season. (via Mynameisharsha)
Bokeh Burger. Robert S. Donovan’s tasty bokeh shot has a sizzling burger set against a barbecue’s blurry burning embers. (via Robert S. Donovan)
Sheltering Angel. A hermit crab shelters inside its shell, with the masterfully handled bokeh effect on glistening pebbles creating a sense of sunlit depth. (via Lel4nd)
Bokehlicious NY Streets. DeaPeaJay expertly handles the balance between the tree in the foreground with the lights of New York behind, achieving just the right level of focus and blur. (via DeaPeaJay)
Sunset Bokeh. Light on water has long been a favorite subject matter for photographers, and a touch of bokeh produces a particularly sedate aesthetic. (via Tanakawho)
Summer in Bokeh. This portrait captures children under sprinkler showers in the summer sun, with a pleasing bokeh effect on the joyful face in the background. (via Wendy Piersall)
Double Sweet Bokeh. This fresh photo has a bokeh blur on the polka dot background and a strawberry in the foreground, with the central fruit’s flesh picked out in stunning detail. 
Bokeh Billiard. Lel4nd’s bokeh shot makes great use of depth, colour and light to capture a cool pool hall aesthetic. (via Lel4nd)
Bokeh Photography Tutorials
There are plenty of tutorials available on the internet where photographers can learn bokeh skills and apply them to their work. The effects can be produced using professional camera equipment, pocket cameras or digitally in applications such as Photoshop. Below is a brief summary of the best tutorials, covering the key areas of bokeh photography.
- DSLR Bokeh Tutorial – Roberts Donovan sets out in simple steps the techniques of bokeh photography with digital SLR cameras. This informative lesson acknowledges that bokeh skills are very simple to pick up, and equally as difficult to master.
- Pocket Camera Bokeh Tutorial – Following on from the previous tutorial, this lesson explains how to apply bokeh techniques to pocket digital cameras. Once again, simple steps layout the principles of achieving bokeh effects, paying particular attention to overcoming the automatic functions of point-and-shoot cameras.
- DIY – Create Your Own Bokeh – This is a really neat tutorial explaining how to create effects using specially cut apertures attached to lens, effectively equipping you with a DIY bokeh kit. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, the possibilities open up for endless experimentation with camera settings and different shapes and sizes of custom-cut apertures.
- Awesome Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop – In this tutorial, Fabio Sasso explains in nine easy-to-follow steps the process of digitally creating bokeh-style effects in Photoshop. The lesson is principally aimed at producing wallpapers, but once the technique is learned it can be applied to other types of image creation.
- Colourful Bokeh Effect in Pixelmator – As in the previous tutorial, this lesson shows how to create attractive bokeh-themed wallpapers, but using Pixelmator instead of Photoshop. The process is simpler in Pixelmator, so you can quickly grasp the skills to make bokeh effects and apply them to a range of digital contexts.
ForeUI is an amazing UI prototyping tool meant for designers, programmers and anyone who needs a desktop tool to create screen mockups for web or desktop applications. You can use ForeUI.com desktop app to create a prototype of an application or a website.
The need of using a prototyping tool is when you have to verify the design with your clients or colleagues and then start the development process. You can use the prototype to write the documentation before starting the development phase or perform usability testing before coding and so on.
Download ForeUI
ForeUI is available for Windows and MAC operating systems and the latest version of ForeUI (2.3.2) can be downloaded from this page
Features of ForeUI Prototyping Tool
When you run the ForeUI desktop app, you see the following work interface:
The middle pane which is shown in white, acts as a board for holding all the elements of your mockup. You can drag and drop the different elements from the sidebar and adjust the position and styling of different elements as you want.
For example: I created a screen mock up of a simple HTML website by dragging and dropping the rectangle element from the sidebar. Following is a preview of the mockup:
Just double click an element from the left sidebar and it appears on the main pane for editing. Next, you can use your mouse to resize it or place it anywhere on the plot. The right sidebar lets you add style rules to the elements e.g adjusting the background color, position, border, width, height, layers and so on.
Here are all the properties of an element which you can tweak:
Next, I wanted to see how the prototype may look in the browser. ForeUI lets you export the mockup to image, PDF or DHTML formats, hence I chose the DHTML format and exported it in my desktop. Following is the result:
This is very useful, I can create the sample of a design and export the copy to PDF or DHTML formats. Then I can email the sample to my clients or developers and they can have a rough idea about my project.
The best part is that the mockup is Fidelity independent. You can always change the style by switching the UI theme and make adjustments as desired. Currently, ForeUI supports 5 UI themes – Windows XP, Windows 7, MAC OS X, Wireframing and Hand Drawing.
Changing the UI theme is very easy, all you have to do is select the theme from the UI theme dropdown as shown below:
The Action Editor : The Action editor in ForeUI lets you define the behaviour of each element in your plot. The behaviour can be a simple message, popup window, link or anything which you want the application to perform once the user interacts with the element.
To access the action editor, select an element and click the action button, shown by a flag:
This will open a pop up window where you can define the action of the element. Defining the action is fairly easy, you have to create a flowchart and add the logic and order of events in the flowchart.
For example: If on clicking a button, you want to show a dialog box containing a Yes / No button. If the user clicks the Yes button, the required action will be performed. If he clicks the No button, he will be returned to the current page.
In that case, you can create a simple If else conditional check and design the flow chart as follows:
Here is how the output will look like:
You can define more complex conditions and logics, this depends on what you want your prototype to perform once the user’s action triggers an event. The Action editor contains a lot of options to define conditional checking, adding different events e.g onclick, mouse hover and looping.
Once you are done with defining the logic and behavior of an element, you can run the simulation and your plot will run as a DHTML page in the browser.
This is really great, you can define how your application interacts with the user and do not have to code anything. Just create the mockup, add the rules and conditional checking and export it as a DHTML page. Then send it to your developers and ask them to do all the coding or design work.
You can also export the UI file of your plot and let your developers see the flowchart and the different order of events associated with a web element. The interactive design and flowchart model is really time saving.
Sharing Resources:
ForeUI supports packing a chosen part of your design as a custom element and exporting it. This is extremely useful when you want to share a part of your design or mockup with anyone.
Consider an example: You are designing a web application and want someone else to work on the site’s navigation. You have already designed the navigation and want the developer to add more features in it.
In that case, you can export the navigation as a custom element and send it to the developer. The developer can then import the custom element as a plot and customize it the way he wants. He can add more elements, events, conditional checking, modify the layout and colors and so on.
When he has finished modifying the custom element, he can export it and send it back to you. Then you can import the modified custom element in your prorotype.
The resource sharing feature is a lifesaver, you can divide the functional areas of your application to different developers. Let them develop the different elements on their own and then merge all the elements together in your prototype.
To export a custom element, click the “Resource sharing” button from the left sidebar. This will open a new popup window where you can sign in with your ForeUI account and share a resource with other users of the ForeUI comunity.
See Examples: At the ForeUI demo page, you can see some good examples of screen mockups and DHTML prototypes. Just click a thumbnail and the demo prototype will run in your browser.
Join the ForeUI Community
ForeUI has an active community of users at ForeUI.net, where you can meet and interact with other people who are already using the ForeUI application. You can download or upload resources from the ForeUI community for Free, this includes custom elements, libraries and plots .If you have any problems or need any help, you can ask questions, leave comments or start a discussion.
More information about using ForeUI is available on the official documentation page.
The free version of ForeUI lets you test all the features for 15 days. If you seriously need a full featured prototyping tool, it’s worth giving ForeUI a try.
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When was the last time you made a decision? A big one. What was the outcome? Was it good, and how did you get to that outcome? Every day we all make plenty of decisions without a thought to how we structure them or the basis on which we make them. We simply make them. We’re lucky that we work in an industry in which erroneous decisions may have serious financial consequences but rarely, if ever, costs lives.
In fields such as aviation and health care, bad decisions can have massive repercussions. As a result, a lot of cash has been spent studying the human factor and developing methods of reducing error. After all, you’d like to think that the person in the cockpit is fully capable of caring for an expensive jet and its passengers.
These studies have led to many conclusions and insights on human behavior, and they have also helped to develop formal decision-making and error-checking processes for people involved in making big decisions. These are models we can learn from and apply to our everyday choices, big and small.
[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]
Why Do We Need Decision-Making Models?
(Image credit: Julia Manzerova)
Quite simply, we don’t. We’re all quite capable of making perfectly good decisions on our own with no outside help. However, we also “don’t need” a 960 grid to structure a great Web design, and we don’t need a validator to make clean, valid website code, but they both help ensure that our output is as good as it should be.
While some people naturally make good decisions, others struggle and need the support of a model or framework, in the same way that some people naturally make balanced Web designs and others prefer the help of a layout grid.
Also, be aware that decision-making models aren’t applied exclusively to rushed decisions on urgent problems, such as unexpected server outages. They can be used to approach any issue, from making an intricate pitch to a client to building or redesigning a website.
Bad Decisions and Good Decisions
Good decisions can save both time and money, and experience, forethought and planning can help you make them. The difference between bad and good decisions is not always clear-cut, and our opinion of our own decisions will often change in hindsight. But making measured and well-considered decisions will make us more comfortable with the course we have chosen and more confident in future decisions.
Stress and Decision-Making
We make decisions under a variety of pressures all the time: workload volumes, financial commitments, deadlines. No surprise that the quality of decisions made under stress is not as good as the quality of those made in calmer times.
By applying a structure, we can clear our heads in stressful times and make effective decisions when needed.
Teamwork
Formalizing the decision-making process can be really effective among groups.
Most people in the Web design industry regularly work on teams, whether with other designers and developers or clients. These collaborations often come with very large communication barriers, such as remote working and teleconferencing and even language differences, each of which has its own problems.
Teleconferencing presents some of the biggest communication barriers. (Image credit: Stuart Cummings)
A formal decision-making process helps to ensure that everyone understands what is being done and why it is being done, and it gives them sufficient time and opportunity to give effective input.
Basic Models
Within the aviation, health care and corporate world, you’ll find a few key decision-making models, all of which aim to provide a sensible, intuitive framework in which to structure better decisions.
SHEL
SHEL is an acronym for Software, Hardware, Environment, Liveware and is used to assess interactions in various situations.
The graph is normally drawn out as a cross, with the central liveware (in our case, the end user) in the middle. It can be used as a brainstorming and planning tool to assess the interaction between the elements in the model and the central liveware.
For Web design, the diagram could be annotated to show these key areas:
A SHEL diagram showing the end user in the middle and including Web design considerations.
Using the SHEL model reinforces the point that the end user should be the primary consideration in any planning process.
The diagram above shows a typical website scenario, but you can use SHEL to cover all of the areas of any project and to check that you have all the information needed to proceed.
Using it as a brainstorming tool with clients, we can ensure that we fully understand the situation and task at hand and can clarify that we are both looking at the same influence factors.
By considering every aspect of an interaction or problem, we minimize the impact of any surprises and modifications down the line and help ourselves make better decisions.
DODAR
The DODAR process is often represented as a circular flow.
DODAR is a primary decision-making tool and stands for Diagnose, Options, Decide, Assign, Review. It captures the five key areas of any decision-making process.
Diagnose is the first step to solving any problem or decision. Find out the problem and what causes it. Use all available resources to identify the problem or to confirm the lack of one.
One of the main reasons for error in decision-making is “confirmation bias,” whereby we make a decision based on a few factors that favor our initial impression, without fully evaluating the problem. How often have you said, “Oh yeah, I know why that is. Won’t take a minute.” And then you find out that the problem isn’t what you thought at all and that the solution will take a little longer. Use the diagnosis stage to make sure you are certain of the issue at hand, by both proving and disproving any ideas or theories.
Options, once you’ve decided what the problem is, look at the options available to you. Assess whether the problem is urgent or can be left for a while. But remember, just because it can be left for a while, doesn’t mean it should be!
Decide on a course of action that you think is sensible, and check this course of action with the other parties involved.
Assign appropriate tasks to people who are capable of carrying them out.
Reviewing is the most important stage of all: making sure everything is going according to plan, and making sure you’re getting the results you expect. Question all of your sources again, and if things aren’t as they should be, then find out why and, if needed, return to diagnose the problem and run through the process again.
As a tool, DODAR is often overlooked because it follows such an obvious and intuitive decision-making process. But by using it as a mental check, you can confirm that you have come to a sensible and well-considered decision.
Facilitating Effective Communication
You can see that using a basic decision-making model on your own is a relatively easy process. But the real value of this structured process is in using it with other people.
A decision-making model helps teams focus on the task at hand together, whether it be evaluating a website redesign or fixing a server bug.
We often struggle to communicate, and our working environment can have huge barriers to effective communication. Remote working and teleconferencing can be the most restrictive because they reduce the communication and interaction available to us to very few dimensions. So, by working in a sensible shared framework, we are able to make effective group decisions despite these restrictions.
By using every stage of the DODAR process to confirm evaluations, assumptions and decisions with others before moving to the next stage, we are able to keep everyone on the same page.
A Group DODAR Example
When looking at any problem, encouraging the group to work through the process together aids everyone’s understanding of the task.
Take a client who is meeting to build a new website. The first step would be to diagnose what needs to be done and why. Does the client need a CMS? Why? Are there hosting issues related to traffic volume or security? Look at your SHEL model here to ensure that each base is covered.
Once you agree on the task, you can assess the options. Will you use WordPress, ExpressionEngine or something else? Will you host it on your main server or do you need a dedicated one?
When you’re both happy with the options, you can then begin to decide on them. You can also look slightly ahead to the next stage of assigning tasks, if relevant.
Having worked through the problem and decided how the website will be built, you can then determine who will do what by assigning tasks and deadlines. Will you write the copy or will the client? Who will supply the photos and artwork?
The last stage is review, which can take one of two forms. First is the more immediate analysis of the process that you have just gone through. Are you both happy with the decisions you made and the tasks you are set to carry out? The second form is to set targets for ongoing review throughout the project; i.e. set deadlines, review dates and targets for those dates.
NITS Brief
A NITS brief is a quick communication framework that is typically used as an emergency brief. But it can be a great mental check list when you want to communicate a task or problem to a colleague or client.
NITS stands for Nature, Intentions, Time, Specials:
- Nature relates to the nature of the problem or task. What is it and why did it happen?
- Intentions are your intentions, or what you hope will be carried out to solve the task.
- Time is either the time it will take to carry out the actions or the time you would like them to be carried out.
- Specials is for anything unusual or unexpected. For example, would a particular colleague normally be expected to do something else? Will they need to contact a different person than usual?
As an emergency brief in the airline industry, this is often used to communicate information from, say, the pilot to a flight attendant. Any form of emergency situation can be easily handled by telling the attendant the nature of the emergency, what the pilot plans to do, how long it will take to do it and whether passengers can expect anything unusual in this situation.
In the less critical world of the Web, this is still a great mental check list. If a few clients are ringing about a server outage, a quick NITS brief will tell them all they need to know:
- Nature: it’s a server outage.
- Intentions: you are rebooting and checking for errors.
- Timing: it will be back up in five minutes.
- Specials: clients won’t have email for ten minutes.
By using the NITS structure and conveying the problem or task in a sensible and easily understood way, you ensure that all bases are covered.
The brief can also be used as a listening and information-gathering tool. For example, when a client rings you with a problem, you would first establish the nature of the problem, find out what they would like you to do about it, estimate the time frame to get it done, and then convey anything else that is unusual for the kind of work you do for them.
Rather than merely confirm their telephone number, read back your brief to check for errors. If you’ve taken notes using the NITS structure, quickly read them back to the client to make sure you haven’t misunderstood anything.
Trapping Errors
Decision-making doesn’t have to start when you’re in hot water and everything has fallen apart. It should be an inherent part of the planning stages of every project, to ensure that potential problems are mitigated. Error recovery and error prevention should be integral parts of every project.
Swiss Cheese Model
James Reason’s “Swiss cheese” model is widely used in the aviation and medical industries to identify how both latent (or dormant) failings and active (quick, often one-off) failings of a system can lead to serious and sometimes catastrophic problems.
Reason’s Swiss Cheese model shows that when errors in separate layers are not caught, they result in a complete failure.
The model is based on the understanding that each layer of protection can be as secure as possible but still have holes. At each layer, the errors on their own are addressed and do not pose serious trouble; but in certain circumstances, all of the errors on the various levels will align to create a much bigger problem. While similar to a domino effect, the problems do not necessarily have to cause or result from each other or be linked in any way. Circumstances simply conspire to create a situation that goes quickly beyond rescue.
Such situations often result from both latent and active failures, rather than just one type. Latent failures are those that exist but go unnoticed for some time: unstable code or open loops, for example. Active failures are apparent and cause problems directly: for example, a traffic spike.
The Herald of the Free Enterprise, which capsized in the North Sea, is considered a classic example of Reason’s model. No single failure on its own was enough to capsize the boat; but combined, they had disastrous consequences. (Image credit: Wikipedia)
Trap, Mitigate, Avoid
We obviously cannot account for every possible eventuality, so by using a three-step model of error management, we should be able to protect ourselves from error chains.
Whenever we encounter an error or the possibility of an error, we can apply the simple thought process of trap, mitigate and avoid.
Most errors should be trapped as soon as they are detected. This is most often done through techniques such as form validation, by which we trap any errors made and display a message to the user, thus preventing errors from affecting the system.
Errors that cannot be trapped should be mitigated. This includes threats from malicious elements, such as SQL injections and other hacking attempts.
Catching procedures that are present in various programming languages is an example of basic error mitigation. While we are essentially trapping an error in certain parts of our code, we are allowing the error to happen and mitigating its effects by catching it.
Finally, any remaining errors should be avoided by not allowing problems to develop into areas beyond your control, such as setting sensible firewalls and memory limits.
To avoid errors on websites, we need to avoid making our code do things it shouldn’t do; for example, by using noscript tags to ensure we do not encounter errors when running JavaScript. Basic error pages such as 404 and 501 also ensure that our website doesn’t exceed its boundaries.
Check Lists
Check lists are already widely used in the development industry, and rightly so because they are one of the most effective methods of preventing and recovering from errors. They fall into two main categories.
Say and Do
With this model, you read each item on the check list and then carry out the appropriate action. It can be used to prevent and recovery from errors.
Prevention is exercised by following step-by-step instructions. The error recovery process usually presents a number of options based on your response to a check. For example, if x, then do y; if not, then do z. The most common example on the Web is troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting page on Windows Live Mail.
The Microsoft troubleshooting pages follow the form of a say-and-do checklist or, in this case, read and do. They recommend an action to carry out and offer further considerations based on the result of the action.
Do and Check
The second type is an “after the fact” check list, in which a particular task is already done and its completion is checked against certain criteria. This is a tick-box exercise, as found on website launch check lists.
Typically, these follow the completion of a memory drill, but in our industry they usually follow the completion of a major action, such as a Web project.
Formalizing routine processes is worthwhile, because they prevent problems for those who are unfamiliar with a procedure and those for whom a procedure has become repetitive.
Making clients aware that you have these processes in place also instills confidence that you are always working from best practices and ensuring that your products always meet high standards and specifications.
Further Resources
You may be interested in these further articles and related resources:
- Fundamental Human Factors Concepts, UK Civil Aviation Authority publication.
- Human Factors, on Wikipedia.
- Error Models, on Wikipeida.
- Human Factors, on Wikiversity.
- Human Error Models and Management
- MS Herald of Free Enterprise, on Wikipeida
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Today, we are releasing a unique layout for a magazine theme called “Hello”. The structure of this theme is unique and the features are out standing. We’re sure you’ll love this magazine wordpress theme.
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By Cameron Chapman
There have been tons of posts about minimalist and simple web design. It’s something every designer should consider and study, as minimalist and simple design principles are important in a lot of website designs. But there’s been such a focus on clean and minimalist design in recent years that many designers shy away from more visually-complex designs.
That’s a mistake. Just as there’s a time and place for minimalist designs, there’s a time and place for more complicated designs, too. Below are some guidelines to help you create more multi-layered website designs. They tend to require more graphics-savvy than minimalist sites, as well as a bit more advance planning. But they’re really no more difficult to create than a minimalist site (and in many cases are more forgiving).
Guidelines for Creating Multi-Layered Designs
We’ve already established that multi-layered designs are more visually-complex than minimalist sites. But that doesn’t tell us a whole lot about how to create them. They can be intimidating to many designers, especially those who started out with minimalist designs.
After all, there seem to be so many places you can go wrong with this kind of design.
Use Some Kind of Theme
The best designs like this have an overall theme or aesthetic they follow. They’re not just throwing together random elements. Sometimes this is something obvious like a particular type of image. Other times it’s a bit more subtle, such as grunge elements throughout.
A site with a very obvious grunge/antique theme throughout.
In either case, a common theme or element helps tie everything in the site’s design together and make it visually cohesive. If you just start throwing all sorts of stuff into the design, you’ll probably just end up with a mess.
Take Something Away
Coco Chanel recommended that when a woman got dressed in the morning that she remove one accessory before leaving the house. The idea behind this is that we often tend of overdo things and by removing something we give more importance to the things that remain.
A great example of a site with lots of visual interest that doesn’t feel cluttered at all.
The same idea can be applied to your website designs. When you think you’ve finished this kind of design, see if there’s something you can take away. There almost always will be, and your design will likely be stronger because of it. This is related to the minimalist principle of perfecting a site when nothing else can be taken away (just in a much less extreme version).
Remember, the goal here is to create a design that has a lot of visual interest, not to create a design that’s cluttered and messy.
Don’t Overlook the Details
Details are what generally set excellent versions of this design aesthetic apart from the less-than-stellar examples. Pay attention to areas where an extra detail can really make your design stand out. Things like typography, narrow borders, etc. are all areas where small details can make a big impact.
A great example of how small details add a lot of interest and a much more polished and put-together look.
Examples
Here are thirty great examples of sites that are much more visually-complex than the current surge of minimalist sites that are flooding the Internet.
Accenture Technology Consulting (ATC) falls within the SI&T organization and provides services aimed at improving the strategic intent, transforming economics and effectiveness, and the overall design, of a company’s information technology capabilities and/or functions. Information technology capabilities include IT planning and management, IT processes and approaches, and IT assets that provide the operational components necessary to run applications.
Job Description:
Technology Consulting professionals are responsible for delivering technology innovation and providing the backbone of our systems integration business. Accenture Service Excellence professionals focus on core IT Service Management / ITIL functions including but not limited to areas such as problem management, service desk, change management, release management, configuration management, portfolio management, service level management and operations gap assessments. They will focus on all aspects of IT Operations including assessment and process development for ITIL’s IT Service Management, covering all phases of work from RFP development, and initial assessment/diagnostic through to process design, organization design and implementation.
Key Responsibilities may include:
Candidates will demonstrate deep skills in areas of process modeling, process simulation, process architecture and organizational design. The individual should also demonstrate business effectiveness skills such as establishing roadmaps for deploying processes for maintaining optimal IT service. This position will vary in the scope of project responsibilities; however generally this position will focus on designing and delivering process solutions such as but not limited to all of the key ITIL Service Management areas. The candidate should have a foundation understanding of ITIL V3.
During client engagements responsibilities include assistance in scoping, pricing and identifying resources supporting the Accenture Senior Manager and account teams. Additionally, this individual will be expected to support the day to day relationship between the project team and senior client executives.
Duties may include:
- Design of process architectures
- Design of operational organizational structures
- Design approach for the Human Performance aspects of an overall implementation effort
- Lead process design projects
Candidate should demonstrate experience and leadership in the following areas:
- Designing and implementing ITIL and Operational processes
- Implementing the Human Performance elements of solutions that deliver client value
- Assist in the designing of support process architectures for critical business systems
- Experience in project management and detailed planning
- Program and Project Leadership
- Leadership skills in both technical and process oriented initiatives
- Generating detailed documentation
This position requires the candidate to work closely with internal Accenture partners to ensure offerings content is current and to identify additional opportunities. As part of this relationship building, the selected candidate will be responsible for building awareness of the key Process Excellence skills and their associated offerings to the Service Lines and Operating Groups in Accenture.
Basic Qualifications:
- Minimum of 5 years experience with ITIL oriented (operational or service management) processes.
- Minimum of 5 years experience in enablement of solutions for Operational Readiness and Capability Delivery (i.e. infrastructure/ application testing and deployment).
- Minimum of 5 years experience in translating process models into IT operational tools based on support of business functions.
- Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree
Preferred Skills:
- Experience in one or more of the following areas:
- Process and organizational enablement for IT Services and Operations
- Service Desk design and deployment
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for deployment of IT Service enabling tools
- Process enablement based on Capacity Modeling & Planning
- High Availability Planning
- Understanding of Change Management, Configuration Management, and Release Management
- Ability to utilize PowerPoint in proposal development
- Ability to produce documentation utilizing the MS Office Suite
- Broad understanding of ITIL V3 and its components
- Nice to Have Skills:
- Supporting Service Management tool suites including HP, BMC Remedy and CA
- Customer Relationship Management
Professional Skills Requirements:
- Strong oral and written communications skills
- Supervisory experience working with a diverse internal and client teams
Candidates who are currently employed by a client of Accenture or an affiliated Accenture business may not be eligible for consideration.
Applicants for employment in the U.S. must possess work authorization which does not require sponsorship by the employer for a visa. Accenture is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Interested? Need more information? Feel free to contact me by email Dorothy.Beach@Accenture.com or leave a message at 469-665-5639 and we can arrange a time for a conversation. Refer to job #80001 .
2009 was a very successful year for Smashing Magazine. It was a year of ambitious goals and an intense time schedule, which brought many changes over the past year. In 2009 we published more posts than ever (on average, 8 posts per week). We broadened our areas of interest: for instance, we explored freelancing and the business side of web development, but also tackled user interface design and mobile web design. We also discovered new formats, such as the “Global Web Design” series and Q&A-Sessions — unfortunately, the latter (the Ask SM series with Chris Coyier) lasted only a couple of months.
None of this would have been possible without the tremendous support of our authors, contributors, and editorial staff. We express sincere gratitude to them for all the ideas and hard work they’ve put into articles published here on Smashing Magazine. We also want to thank you, the readers, for your attention, criticism, ideas, suggestions, emails, tweets, and links over the past year. Smashing Magazine is driven by your support which is why we are always listening to you and we truly appreciate every message we receive.
We have tried our best to improve the quality of our articles so as to increase their value for designers and developers. In this post, we’ll review what has happened on Smashing Magazine over the past year: smashing highlights, setbacks, and small sensations of 2009 — which we present in a month by month timeline. You can compare the highlights of 2009 with those of 2008 or 2007 (which, by the way, include links to some really useful articles).
January
The year starts with a rather lengthy post 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers which actually doesn’t gain a lot of attention in January, but gains traffic significantly throughout the year. We start gathering material for this ultimate collection of iPhone wallpapers in early December and four writers help by selecting the most useful resources and the most beautiful wallpapers.
By far the most popular article of the month is Web Design Trends For 2009. We carefully examine what’s happening on the web in 2008 and came up with a couple of trends that we think will appear in the web design landscape in 2009. Some of our predictions turn out to be correct. And yes, we’re already preparing a similar post for 2010.
February
In February, Paul Boag reveals 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites. His article seems to speak from the heart of thousands of designers and developers. The article gets positive feedback and we even receive tweets from two corporate site owners who agree to keep the key points of the article in mind for future redesigns.
Also, Alexander Makarov takes a couple of work days off, tests 9 popular PHP IDEs, and presents a very detailed review of popular PHP IDEs in the article The Big PHP IDE Test: Why Use One And Which To Choose. He also prepares an extensive spreadsheet for public review. An editable version is available as well (we hope that other developers will voluntarily add reviews to other IDEs), however we are forced to close editing because of vandalism.
February is also a busy month for us and our readers. We announce a Hardware Giveaway with almost 9000 comments — more comments than WordPress can handle at the time. Newer versions of WordPress offer comment pagination – probably added for that reason. We also announce the Smashing Book — our most important project in 2009. As you may know, there was a long road leading up to its final release in early December.
March
In March, we get technical. We publish articles related to Ruby On Rails, MySQL, Subversion, and PHP. The latter is a first-ever rebuttal of one of our previous articles; it’s written by PHP gurus Chris Shiflett and Sean Cotes. They take a closer look at the previously published article, explain its errors and reveal what is right and wrong in its theory and practice. From this point on, we consider getting experts to technically review articles before they’re published.
The most popular post of the month is 70 New, Useful AJAX and JavaScript Techniques, prepared by Noura Yehia. We get back to our roots, to the good old days when we picked the best coding and design-related resources and present them in a well-researched round-up. Although many people have criticized the “list” article format, most readers still find such round-ups useful, so we continue publishing them. Over the course of the year we pushed lists back a bit, trying to publish more unique and thought-provoking content.
The most controversial inspirational post of the month is definitely Bizarre Surreal and Dark Art Pictures, prepared by Aquil Akhter. The post doesn’t seem to leave anyone unaffected; some readers hate it, some readers love it, and it brings a large spike in traffic.
This month we also announce the Smashing Community Icon Set where we ask readers what icons they need with plans to design the icons together with a professional icon design agency, then release them for free. Unfortunately, the winner — portfolio icon set — is still not ready (the design agency is working on some nifty features), but we hope to finally release the set in early 2010.
April
In March we start discussing with Jacob Gube what would be an interesting twist for April’s Fools Day and we come up with a nice idea. As a result, we publish Jacob Gube’s article Breaking: Internet Explorer 8.1 Eagle Eyes Leaked. The article takes a look at the new version of Internet Explorer and claims that it has Mozilla Firefox extensions support, excellent performance against the Acid 3 test, and a server-side code decompiler. The news spreads across social media and the article gets a nice traffic spike through StumbleUpon.
In April, Rob Morris presents 5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs. In general, April turns out to be one of the best months of the year. We publish 47 articles related to very different topics (freelancing, graphics design, typography, CSS, conversion rates, logo design) and thus manage to cover a wide variety of topics — resulting in much positive feedback. Many readers, however, complain that we publish too often, so in the following months we begin to publish at a more moderate pace.
May
May turns out to be a practical month. We re-discover round-ups with very useful resources. We publish a round-up of useful glossaries, the ultimate general guide to industry terms that should get our readers well on their way to understanding what web designers are talking about. We also discuss ways to put your content in front of more people.
The most popular posts of the month are graffiti artworks and Free WordPress Themes for 2009. Inspirational posts work well, but the appetite of our readers is growing. Over the coming months we begin to see a rise of resistance against inspirational posts which are labeled “lazy content”. We listen and do our best to improve the quality of inspirational posts while reducing the number of such posts and making room for more practical articles.
June
June turns out to be a time for experiments. Because we observe a large number of Mac-users in our stats, we decide to publish a couple of Mac-related posts. We started slowly in May, and continued in June with Exposé tips and tweaks for your Mac. However, in the articles we’re not just praising Mac. As it turns out, if you want some traffic and discussions on your blog, banter Apple, its products, or fans. We do it and the article Why Web Developers Don’t Need A Mac gets 655 comments. However, focusing articles on Mac is not a good idea — the feedback is very negative. After June we focus on more general design-related topics and let the Windows-Mac debate rest in peace.
The most remarkable posts of the month are Inayaili de Leon’s challenge to take your design to the next level with CSS3 and Gareth Hardy’s discussion of common mistakes in logo design. One of the most useful posts of the year is Cameron Chapman’s round-up of web design checklists and questionnaires which performs fairly well in terms of traffic and user feedback.
In general, through the first six months of the year, CSS-related articles perform best. We notice this and start looking for more professional CSS/JS-developers who have time for writing. We also intensify our cooperation with our current writers. The results are seen in the months to come.
July
July is another month with a wide variety of design-related topics. Our advanced readers learn about clever PNG optimization techniques. The most-discussed article of the month is The Roadmap To Becoming A Professional Freelance Web Designer. We start to get more requests for freelance-related topics, ranging from pricing to organization to project management. We carefully write down the most promising ideas and assign topics to regular and new authors.
We try to take our inspirational posts to a new level, making them more extensive and less random. Our first result is Diogo Terror’s article about Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design. The article goes to extreme lengths explaining various techniques from the time as well as showcasing beautiful Swiss style artworks. Unfortunately, very few readers appear to be interested. Although the article takes a couple weeks to prepare, the traffic is very low and it gets just 75 comments.
We present the results of our Typographic Layout Design Contest in which we aim to collect beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by the design community and release them for free. The response is overwhelming and we release 45 free typographic (X)HTML/CSS templates. Unfortunately, this is the last contest we offer in 2009. But no worries, new contests are coming in 2010!
August
In August we present the findings of our large study of typographic design practices in modern web design. We identify 13 general typographic problems and issues related to typographic design and present answers to them that we found through our research. Among other things, we discover the most popular typefaces, average font sizes, line height, and the number of characters per line. The study is extremely time-consuming, but we don’t care. The results are very useful and that’s what really matters.
We publish a quite controversial article If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers… in which our author Francisco Inchauste explores inspirational paintings and artists who have influenced modern design. The article gains a lot of attention and instigates some rough discussions in the comments to the post.
We explain how to code your first HTML 5 layout and your first iPhone application. And, of course, we publish probably the most bizarre post ever: Unique TV Series Episodes That Inspire Creativity, written by Louis Lazaris. It’s a review of how particular TV episodes were different from what came before, and how this can serve as motivation for future designs. The article doesn’t make sense for some readers, but most are quite intrigued, which is a good sign.
September
September starts unpleasantly for Smashing Magazine. We are under siege. Someone attempts to infiltrate our main server and manages to manipulate some HTML data. The consequence: a new server (we moved from a cluster to the cloud), a new internal security policy (which still causes some problems for us and appears to be a bit too restrictive), secure FTP and, of course, more costs.
We need a little time to recover, but get back on track quite quickly. We follow the attack with a few involved, thought-provoking articles: in the article CSS Wishlist: New Ideas, Debates and Solutions Kayla Knight discusses the current state of CSS and describes some alternative CSS syntaxes and CSS programming concepts as well as already-available techniques and tools. We reveal professional team management tips as well as the findings of our portfolio design study.
Many coding articles on Smashing Magazine cover various WordPress-related tips, tricks and techniques. Almost every month we published at least two articles related to WordPress; in September we published one of the most popular WordPress-related posts of the year: How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress, written by Thiemo Fetzer. You can bet that we will continue publishing more WordPress-related articles in 2010.
Also in this month, Jon Tan helps us to create the Smashing Experts Panel: because some articles were incorrect or contained factual errors, we invite experts and professional designers and developers to do paid reviews of Smashing Magazine’s articles before they’re published. As of this writing, we have over 25 experts in the panel. This turns out to be bittersweet news for our authors: editing and feedback now need more time and authors need to be more precise in their articles.
October
The last few months of the year are months of big changes for us and for our readers. In October, for the first time in our young history, we acquire an existing website, Noupe.com, created in 2007 by the Egyptian Blogger Noura Yehia. At the moment Noupe has a regular publishing schedule and is updated as frequently as Smashing Magazine.
In October, Louis Lazaris explains CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 which is a new format for Smashing Magazine. For the first time, we’re publishing a useful reference article that can be looked up when our readers are handling browser inconsistency issues. And it works; the article has 238 comments and gains organic traffic from search engines. Also, in October we start our new series “Global Web Design” in which we feature web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and explore what’s happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start with Russian Web Design. The new series is a success, so you can expect more exciting posts in the series in 2010.
Apart from classic CSS and usability posts, the month brings many original articles. For instance, Brand = User Experience: The Interface of a Cheeseburger. Our readers share their excitement about the original content and want to see similar posts on Smashing Magazine in the future. We listen and start preparing other thought-provoking articles in the months to come. And, of course, it was pretty cool to put the image of a tasty cheeseburger on Smashing Magazine’s front page. We’re sure no design-related blog has done that before!
Important to us was Smashing Magazine’s Redesign and the Smashing Network. The redesign is done by Liam McKay and his design agency, WeFunction. However, we subsequently tweaked a couple of things in the design (and Liam is still unhappy about these changes). Footer and sidebar illustrations are designed by Pasquale D’Silva. The idea behind the network is to promote high-quality content on the Web design scene and to make it worthwhile for publishers to produce useful and interesting design-related articles. We want our community to benefit from these articles and support the publishers with direct traffic from Smashing Magazine.
November
November is another important month for us. Finally, after 3 years of working in different cities, we move to our first joined office in Freiburg (Germany). This is also the reason why the rest of the year is a bit hectic: there are literally hundreds of things that had to be considered, discussed, and taken care of.
Probably the most practical article of the month is Kat Neville’s post about invoice design. The article presents some general guidelines, best practices and examples that will help you make sure your invoices are up to spec. Some articles need tremendous work and vivid discussions before they finally get published. One of these is The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing by Thomas Giannattasio. Can you spot all the hours of work that were put into it?
In November we have quite a surprise for our readers. Together with Paddy Donnelly, we discuss creating a spectacular post that covers a recent trend in modern web design: magazine-style blog post designs, or art-directed blog posts. Paddy refers to it as a ‘blogazine’. After four weeks of preparation, the article The death of the boring blog post? finally goes live. The surprise is that when a user clicks on the link to the post, he lands on a page which has a layout and design that’s completely different from the rest of Smashing Magazine. According to our stats, many users reloaded the page wondering where the “usual” layout had gone.
The article is one of the best posts of 2009, as it manages to spark a huge discussion in the design community and gains over 550 comments. The readers are in disagreement about the design of the article, but the idea is inspiring and shortly after it’s published we start to see a couple of emerging new ‘blogazines’.
December
Finally. The Smashing Book is released. Announced in February, and discussed in several posts throughout the year, in December it finally arrives. Actually, you can buy the Smashing Book right now, available exclusively from Smashing Magazine — all orders are now shipped right away. This one was really hard work and most things didn’t work out as we had planned, but the positive reactions and impressions of our readers are definitely worth it. We see huge involvement from our readers who post their images, videos, tweets and reviews in social media. Feedback is overwhelming and users’ expectations are high. The coming months will show how well we did our job with the book.
Among other news, in December we hire our regular writer Cameron Chapman — she becomes the editorial manager on Smashing Magazine. Cameron is a professional writer, web- and graphic designer with over 6 years of experience. She will still be writing articles for Smashing Magazine, but now she also handles communication between many of our new and regular authors, discussing article ideas with them.
In terms of content, December turns out to be a slow month with less traffic and fewer comments — apparently, our readers have other things to take care of. Still, we keep publishing useful and original content. We explain how you can push your buttons with CSS3 and support IE and still be cutting-edge.
In December, we publish the most challenging article of the year: we encourage our readers to design something every day for the next 365 days. We encourage participants to tweet each new design along with #daily365 so that everyone will can see the progress of each project. Some designers are already participating! So are you up for the challenge?
What should you expect in 2010?
We’re planning some big changes in the coming months. Soon we will release the Smashing Network Widget for your website and a mobile version of Smashing Magazine. Well-known authors and experts are currently writing articles for us. You can also expect to see more new team members and newly released books in cooperation with a publishing house. Also, the translation of the Smashing Book to other languages (currently only Korean version) is being prepared. We also have some interesting plans for Smashing Magazine and the design community, so you better stay tuned to our updates in 2010.
We’ll do our best to deliver useful and inspiring high-quality articles in the new year. We’ll come up with new ideas to keep Smashing Magazine an exciting place. And we’ll be listening to your ideas, suggestions, complaints and criticism. Have a truly smashing, successful, healthy and peaceful new year in 2010!
What was the most memorable Smashing Magazine post in 2009?
Your opinion has always been very important to us. Please share your impressions about our work over the last year and let us know what you would like to see changed on Smashing Magazine in 2010. Also, what was your most memorable Smashing Magazine’s post in 2009? We’ll do our best to improve Smashing Magazine in the new year!
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When one speaks of retro art, images of art styles derived from advertising and propaganda posters from 1930s to 1960s usually flood the mind. The simple graphics made from oil paints reflect the less advanced technology of that time. This period is also a time of significant turbulence in our modern history, when major events such as the rise of communism and World Wars were taking ground. It is then not surprising that many posters serve as propaganda tools for the ruling governments. These propaganda images eventually contributed to the development of different retro art styles.
Many of the following retro art pieces that you will see are actual posters produced during those time. We’ve searched a couple of sources to compile a great list of retro art styles comprising not only of propaganda art pieces, but also a few other kind such as advertising posters. In addition, we have separated these pieces into two main categories, Western and Chinese retro art. Full list after jump.
The West: Retro Posters from the West
Here we have Soviet posters during the rise of communism as well as propaganda posters during World War II. There are also some miscellaneous ones like film and product ads, along with some retro-inspired art.
The Power of Propaganda: Wartime Posters
Syd Mead Concept Design for US Steel
Soviet Flag Over the Reichstag
We Will Not Allow This to Happen Again!
Great Stalin is A Flag of the USSR’s Friendship
Everything for the Victory – Women of USSR for the Front
Liberated woman – Build Up Socialism!
1953 Advertising Calendar for Hotpoint Appliances
The East: The Chinese Art of Propaganda
As a result of over 5,000 years of China’s history and culture, Chinese art has always been uniquely different from the West. Here you will see how traditonal Chinese art evolved into retro art that still maintains its distinct culture while incorporating Western art elements to spread communism.
Revolutionary Committees are Good
The Working Class is the Main Force in the Campaign
Win Honor for Our Great Leader Chairman Mao
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army
Learn from the Spirit of Daqing
We’ll Definitely Beat the World Record
The Chinese People are Not Easily Humiliated
Smash the Old World; Establish the New World
Brilliant Light of the Red Sun
I Love the Blue Sky of Motherland
Art Comes From Life’s Struggles
These propaganda artworks were collected from Life.com, Flickr, Crestock, kaladarshan, Chinese Poster Online and other websites.