Free ebook Smashing Magazine 5th anniversary offer

This free ebook contains the best articles that have been published on Smashing Magazine in the last five years. It is available in PDF, ePUB and Mobipocket formats. Topics include:

• Thirty Usability Issues to Be Aware Of
• Ten Principles of Effective Web Design
• Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
• Ten Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines
• Setting Up Photoshop for Web and iPhone Development
• The Ails of Typographic Anti-Aliasing
• Mastering Photoshop: Noise, Textures and Gradients
• Better User Experience With Storytelling
• The Beauty of Typography, Writing Systems and Calligraphy
• Web Designers, Don’t Do It Alone
• Making Your Mark on the Web Is Easier Than You Think
• Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How to Use It
• I Want to Be a Web Designer When I Grow Up
• Persuasion Triggers in Web Design
• What Font Should I Use?
• The Design Matrix: A Powerful Tool for Guiding Client Input
• Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed
• Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone?
• Make Your Content Make a Difference
• Two Cats in a Sack: Designer-Developer Discord
• Print Loves Web

“Time is Nothing” (time lapse video of 25,000 miles across 17 countries in 290 seconds)

Photographer Kien Lam visited 17 countries in 343 days to create this time lapse video. He rode 19 planes, 58 buses, and 18 boats in his travels. He shot 6,237 pictures in all.

Background music is “Places and Faces” by his brother William (Metaphysika Sounds).

Visit the Around The World FAQ page.

“Pictures work better than text”

When Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air as “the world’s thinnest notebook,” one slide showed a photograph of the new computer on top of an envelope, which was even larger than the computer itself. That’s it. No words, no text boxes, no graphs, just the photo. How much more powerful can you get? The picture says it all. (The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo, pages 99-100)

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Carmine Gallo

Free e-book on photography

Scott Bourne’s Essays On Inspiration, Creativity & Vision In Photography

From Essay #4 Storytelling Part 2 (page 21):

You see ALL communications and ALL media - whether they be centered around radio, television, motion pictures, blogs, podcasts or photography - revolve around story. Story is everything. If you get that, you'll be a better photographer.

If you need help getting to the point where you are a storyteller, you can use a vision exercise that I often talk about called SAS - which stands for Subject, Attention, Simplify.

How to create word clouds

“Word cloud websites are great ways to create colorful interesting graphics that have lots of impact but are not much work to create. Though many programs are available to do this, this video gives you a brief overview of Tagxedo, a program that not only creates colorful Word Cloud, but makes it easy to save them and use them in other programs, something many of the other programs don’t do.” (From Yvon Prehn) Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

With Tagxedo, you can:

• make word clouds in real-time, and respin, and respin to your liking
• save the word cloud as images for printing and sharing
• look at all variants of the clouds in a gallery (see screenshot above), and pick the one you want for further tweaking or saving
• choose from many different fonts
• use local fonts (e.g. downloaded from Font Squirrel, DaFont, FontSpace, or your own hand-drawn fonts)
• quickly switch between different colors and themes
• constrain the cloud to selected shapes (heart, star, cloud, oval, etc)
• use images as custom shapes (e.g. Reddit Alien) [premium feature]
• use words as custom shapes (e.g. "USA", "Love", "Joy", "I LOVE YOU") [premium feature]

The Power of Words: Change your words, change your world

Free PDF about online journalism

“Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, A digital literacy guide for the information age”, by Mark Briggs (Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News, The News Tribune)

PDF English version now available for download; also available in Spanish or Portuguese. You can also order hard copies.

Topics include: Chapter 1: FTP, MB, RSS, Oh My

Chapter 2: Web 2.0

Chapter 3: Tools and Toys

Chapter 4: New Reporting Methods

Chapter 5: How to Blog

Chapter 6: How to Report News for the Web

Chapter 7: Digital Audio and Podcasting

Chapter 8: Shooting and Managing Digital Photos

Chapter 9: Shooting Video for News and Feature Stories

Chapter 10: Basic Video Editing

Chapter 11: Writing Scripts, Doing Voice-overs

For continuing discussion of new technology for journalists, check out Mark Briggs’ Journalism 2.0 site.