Web design is a fickle industry. Just like every other form of artistic expression, Web design has undergone a continuous and surprisingly fast evolution. Once a playground for enthusiasts, it has now become a mature rich medium with strong aesthetic and functional appeal. In fact, we are experiencing what could be the golden era of Web design — or at least the best period thus far. We have powerful new tools at our disposal (CSS3, HTML5, font-embedding, etc.), a plethora of freely available resources, a strong design community and also (if you needed any more!) reliable support of Web standards in the major browsers.

We’re seeing better interaction design and more aesthetically pleasing designs. And we’re seeing more personal, engaging and memorable sites, too. But what exactly is making the difference? What new directions is Web design heading in today? What new techniques, concepts and ideas are becoming important? In this article, we present some observations on the current state of Web design. We describe existing and upcoming trends and explain how Web design might evolve in the coming months and years. We’ll also touch on what we as Web designers should be ready for to keep abreast of new challenges and opportunities.

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College and university websites have a lot of roles to fill. They need to provide information for prospective students (both new and transfer), parents of students and prospective students, current students, and alumni. In many cases, they’re also the gateway to the school’s intranet and the public face for both academics and athletics. They often need to include reams of information in a way that makes everything easy to find. It’s a huge challenge.

And the truth is: most college and university websites are horribly designed. Either they look like they were designed fifteen years ago and then forgotten about, or they’re so overloaded with information that it’s almost impossible to find what you’re looking for.

But not every college or university website is horrible. There are some excellent sites out there, and below are some of them. If you know others, please share them in the comments to this post!

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Today we’d like to publish something completely different for a change. India, the country of mysterious paradoxes; the land where civilizations and times intermix, a mysterious place which attracts people from all over the world. In today’s showcase we are presenting a little showcase of this astonishing contrast between wealth and misery, contemporary technologies and ancient historical monuments, plenty of languages, cultures and traditions.

We present people, places, traditions, culture and a broad overview of the incredible beauty of India — something different and inspirational for a change. Please let us know if you are interested in seeing more similar posts on Smashing Magazine in the future in the comments below.

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Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

The last section also covers a number of useful educational resources such as a compilation of useful JavaScript coding practices, a detailed comparison of JavaScript frameworks and general JavaScript programming conventions. We are looking forward to your feedback.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

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Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

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A Graphical User Interface (GUI for short) allows users to interact with the computer hardware in a user friendly way.

Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windowsamiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more.

We’ll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.

I should mention that this article showcases only the significant advances in GUI design (not operating system advances) and also not all of the graphical user interfaces and operating systems existing today.

The first GUI was developed by researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the ’70s. This research opened a whole new era of computer graphic innovations.

The first personal computer which used a modern graphical user interface was the Xerox Alto, developed in 1973. This was not a commercial product and was intended mainly for research at universities.

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This article showcases 30+ stunning web designs that make use of the incredible watercolor effect. The showcase is followed up with a small selection of links sharing a few tutorials and watercolor textures and brushes that you can use in your own designs.

watercolor design

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In Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms can be found everywhere. Every start-up tries to attract visitors’ attention, so web-forms are becoming more and more important for the success of any company. In the end, exactly those web-forms are responsible for the first contact with potential customers. Let’s take a look, which modern solutions a web-developer can use, designing his/her next css-based form.

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Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers.

This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects.

So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. While one could apply many approaches, techniques and principles to UI design in general, our focus here will be on business Web applications.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

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Well it’s January already and we’re all tired from the holidays and stuff, but we never have enough goodies to read and our RSS basket is never too full. So here’s the list of inspiring blogs for January. Also, don’t forget to follow them on Twitter as well and be …

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