Vexel art is a digital art that is an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the vector graphics technique, but is distinguished from normal vector graphics or raster images. "Vexel" itself is a mixture of two words ‘Vector’ and ‘Pixel’. Vexel designs are composed by using multiple layered shapes. It can be done in Photoshop, but vexel designs are not limited to only Photoshop; essentially, it can be done with any image editing software that has a good Pen Tool.

Below are some truly amazing examples of vexel artwork and also some outstanding tutorials that will help you to master the technique or at least get some understanding of how this technique can be used. Feel free to explore further works of the artists presented below. Enjoy and be inspired.

With its latest releases, WordPress has extended its potential well beyond blogging, moving toward an advanced, robust and very powerful content management solution. By default, WordPress delivers a very lightweight, minimal system that offers only basic functionalities. But where the WordPress core falls short, there are a wealth of plug-ins that extend its limitations.

Plug-ins often offer simple solutions, but they are not always elegant solutions: in particular, they can add a noticable overhead, e.g. if they offer more functionality than needed. In fact, some general and frequently needed WordPress-functionalities can be added to the engine without bloated plugins, using the software itself.

This article presents 8 tips for WordPress template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges, with little to no plug-in dependence. These examples are written for WordPress 2.7+ and should also work in the latest WordPress-version.

When people talk about image optimization, they consider only the limited parameters offered by popular image editors, like the "Quality" slider, the number of colors in the palette, dithering and so on. Also, a few utilities, such as OptiPNG and jpegtran, manage to squeeze extra bytes out of image files. All of these are pretty well-known tools that provide Web developers and designers with straightforward techniques of image optimization.

In this article, we'll show you a different approach to image optimization, based on how image data is stored in different formats. Let's start with the JPEG format and a simple technique called the eight-pixel grid.

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 July 2009?

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there's a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That's where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability to accessibility to standards, you're a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site.

Below are 45 checklists to make your design process easier and more organized. Consider using these checklists as a jumping off point for creating your own customized list, based on your own needs.

Also consider our previous articles:

• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website lists some important things to check before you make your sites public.
• 10 Designer's Checkpoints To Be Aware Of offers a list of things every designers should know about their sites.

Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Like the petrol and car relationship, without solid skills writers cannot move ahead. These skills don’t come overnight, and they require patience and determination. You have to work smart and hard to acquire them. Only with experience, you can enter the realm of effective, always-in-demand writers.

Of course, effective writing requires a good command of the language in which you write or want to write. Once you have that command, you need to learn some tips and tricks so that you can have an edge over others in this hard-to-succeed world of writers. There are some gifted writers, granted. But gifted writers also need to polish their skills frequently in order to stay ahead of competition and earn their livelihood.

We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. You will find copywriting blogs, dictionaries, references, classes, articles, tools as well as related articles from other blogs. Something is missing? Please let us know in the comments to this post!

Macro photography is also known as close-up photography. Compared to other types of photography, macro photography is quite difficult, because of the nifty equipment, lightning and other techniques involved. However, in the end it comes down to what kind of pictures you want to take and what level of precision you are striving for.

In this inspirational showcase, we've collected some beautiful macro pictures, as well as some useful macro photography tutorials – for people at all levels of experience.

You may also be interested in the following related posts:

• 25 Beautiful Macro Photography Shots
  

CSS-design is not easy. We need to find workaround across browser inconsistencies, not that easy CSS-concepts and quite counterintuitive CSS-solutions. However, there are effective and useful CSS-tools and Smashing Magazine reviewed many of them in our previous posts. Now it's time to present you with some fresh (or not mentioned earlier) tools that can assist designers in their work.

Today, we will look at 35 new and useful CSS tools, generators and resources that can significantly improve your workflow and reduce your time efforts for CSS-coding. Whether you're writing, compiling, refining or experimenting with CSS code – or all of the above – these tools can help you get the job done faster and better than ever before.

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

• 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding
• 53 CSS Techniques You Couldn't Live Without

With the power of the Web, and more eyes watching than ever, it's important for a business to communicate its unique message clearly. The easiest way to recognize a company and distinguish it from others is by its logo. Below, we go through 10 common logo design mistakes that you should avoid if you want to create a successful and professional logo.

A professional business should look professional. New business owners often invest a lot of time and money in property and equipment, but do not often match it by investing suitably in their logo.

The most common reasons why many logos look amateurish: the business owner wanted to save money by designing the logo quickly themselves, a friend or relative who claims to know a little about graphic design does it as a favor or the wrong people are commissioned or the business outsourced the job via one of several design competition websites, which are mostly populated by amateur designers.

In this post we release Birdies: A Free Twitter Icon Set, a set of 12 beautiful and lovely Twitter icons. This set was designed by IconEden and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. All the icons included in the set have clean shapes and neutral colors that can be used for various contexts, from a "Tweet it" button for your blogs to desktop wallpapers.

The set is available in both pixel and EPS vector format so the icons can be rescaled to any size while retaining their original details. As usual, the icons are free for both personal and commercial projects.

A module tab is a design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content's corresponding tab control.

Module tabs are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs, they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content.

This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. We share with you some best practices to consider when using module tabs, a listing of real-world examples of websites the take advantage of module tabs, as well as tutorials and free downloadable scripts for building and deploying module tabs in your sites.

Design patterns were first described in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, a civil engineer who noticed that many things in our lives happen according to patterns. He adapted his observations to his work and published many findings on the topic. Since then, design patterns have found their place in many areas of our lives, and can be found in the design and development of user interfaces as well.

In short, design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects. In fact, you may already be using them now without knowing it.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites
• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms: part 1, part 2.

Our biggest and most important project of the year, the Smashing Book, has come in swinging. Eleven extensive articles have been written, as decided by our readers. They are at various stages of completion. Creating a book ultimately requires more effort and dedication than online articles because, in the end, nothing can be changed, and readers have to pay for a physical product.

We have tried to keep errors to a minimum; several correction cycles were required: hard times for our proofreader Andrew Lobo. The writing was done (in alphabetical order) by Adelle Charles, Alessandro Cattaneo, Andrew Maier, Chris Spooner, Darius A. Monsef (Colourlovers), David Leggett, Dmitry Fadeyev, Jacob Gube, Jon Tangerine (partial editing), Rene Schmidt, Steven Snell, Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman.

The book will have 313 pages and 11 chapters, printed completely in color.

We have reserved 100 copies for review purposes. These are for magazines, blogs and other editorial publications in our industry. All publications, both small and new or old and large, are eligible to receive a free copy for review. But copies are limited. Simply head over to our email form, select "Book Review Copy" as your subject (this is important), type in your name, your postal address and the title and the URL of your blog / magazine / publication (this is important, too) – and that's it!

Unfortunately, we have received way too many requests already – no requests are accepted any longer.

JavaScript is an integral part of the RIA revolution. JavaScript allows developers to create rich and interactive web interfaces and establish asynchronous communication with servers for constantly up-to-date data without a page refresh.

Many things that were once accomplished using Flash objects can now be built using JavaScript - with the added benefit that it is free, typically more web and mobile accessible under most circumstances using best practices for development techniques, and without the need to use proprietary software for development.

Though JavaScript has been around for a while, new tools, techniques, and information are constantly being pumped out to continually push the technology into greater heights. In this article, we wish to share with you a huge list of fresh and new tools and resources that JavaScript developers will find useful and informative.

Here are a few other posts that you might find interesting:

• 50 Useful JavaScript Tools
• 40 Useful JavaScript Libraries
• jQuery and JavaScript Coding

Today we are glad to release 30 Swirl Brushes, a set with 30 high-quality swirl Photoshop brushes with an average size 2000px. These brushes were created with Adobe Photoshop CS4 and also work with the version CS, CS2 and CS3. This set was designed by Thomas Béal 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.

Working on a Mac is a nice experience. Not only because of the aesthetics, but also because of the many useful tools built right into the operating system. One such tool is Exposé, which allows instant access to just about anything on your desktop with the press of a button. If used correctly, it can be a powerful ally in the war against screen clutter, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, it can seem quite daunting.

That’s where I come in – I’m here with five useful tips that will allow any Mac user to get the most out of Exposé, and their screen space.

You may be interested in the following related posts as well:

• 30 Must Have Tweaks For Your Mac
• Mac Hacks: 17 AppleScripts To Make Your Life Easier
• Mac OS X Leopard: Designer’s Guide to Icons
• 200+ Hotkeys To Boost Your Productivity

Almost everyone out there who runs a website has toyed with the idea of selling ads on their website. So many options are available. Dozens of ad and affiliate networks exist, and you have different ad formats to consider. Should you sell text ads or banner ads? Should you allow Flash ads? What about ads with sound, pop-ups or floating ads? People have so many decisions to make that they often just end up slapping on some AdSense code and calling it a day. And that's fine.

But you have a ton of other options for displaying ads on your website, from using other ad networks to selling and managing banner ads yourself. There are plug-ins for virtually every CMS and blogging platform out there that allow you to rotate banner ads or insert blocks of ad code.

This post is a collection of ad management plug-ins for WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal and Joomla! to get your started. At the end are a few tutorials for creating your own banner ad rotation scripts in PHP and ASP (so that even if a plug-in is not available for your CMS of choice, you'll likely be able to build your own).

You might also want to check out our article on AdSense, 100% Google AdSense: Tools, Tips and Resources.

Today we are glad to release Quartz Icon Pack, a set with 90 clean, sharp and (hopefully) useful icons for your project. This set was designed by our friend, a Romanian designer Andy Gongea especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The Quartz icon set contains 90 semi-transparent .png-icons in the resolution 64×64px.

The icons can be used without any restrictions for any type of composition – text- or graphic-based. The icons cover a wide range of designs – e-mail icons, software icons, general web application icons and blog icons. The set is free to download and use in any projects.

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

• Flavour Extended Icon Set
• “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme
• Typography Keyboard Layout