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Often it is the close attention to small details that makes a design outstanding. During the development of a website, designers tend to quickly forget about small details and focus on major design elements, such as navigation, typography and layout. If done properly, the result is usually a solid, impressive and highly professional design that communicates information. However, it is not memorable. The reason is that such designs often do not have a memorable voice: they may look visually appealing, but they don’t provide a vivid anchor for users to remember a website after leaving it.

In this post, we showcase the design of “Back to top” links, a forgotten and rarely used link that helps users jump to the top of a given page. A visitor can achieve this effect by pressing the “Home” button on his or her keyboard; however, not every user is aware of that shortcut, and most probably use the vertical scroll bar in the browser for that purpose. As designers, we can help our users out by adding a stand-alone “top” link to our designs.

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Design portfolios come in various forms. Traditionally they have been print-based and something you would carry to a client pitch or meeting to showcase what you’ve done and how you do it. Today, many designers take advantage of the nature of the internet to publish and showcase their work via their online portfolios. Having your work displayed online removes the geographical restraints that traditional portfolios impose on you.

In this showcase, you’ll find a variety of beautiful, unique, and highly-creative portfolio designs. The aim here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire you to create your own portfolio or re-think your existing one. You’ll get to see portfolios from a wide range of fields including web design, product design, illustration, photography, and even animation. Without further ado, we present to you 50 beautiful and creative portfolio designs.

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

• Creating A Successful Online Portfolio
  In this article we’ll review 5 pitfalls that commonly plague portfolio design. Then we’ll cover Portfolio Tips that if carefully considered and well executed will deliver quality results for your portfolio.

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In this post we release the iPhone Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as six different interface options for iPhone. This pack may be useful for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups to clients or to work out ideas. This set was designed by Renee Rist 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, sub-licensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

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Your website represents your brand. New visitors will form a first impression of your service or product within seconds of arriving at your website, and the visuals, layout and aesthetic will play a large role in shaping that impression. Sure, your website may be very usable and have great content, but it’s the aesthetic that will evoke feeling, and it’s the aesthetic that will be used to judge the quality of your website in those first few seconds before the visitor has had time to browse around.

Use this to your advantage and fashion a unique style that will set your website apart from the rest — a style that will impress and delight your users.

Throughout history, great artists always found new ways to express themselves and create new techniques to set their work apart from the rest. Think about the styles of Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock. Think about the different movements of art, from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism and Minimalism. These styles couldn’t be more different from each other — and that’s the point. The artists’ names live on because their art is unique.

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Today we are glad to release Girl Avatars Icon Set, a set with 21 original avatar icons. This set was designed by Navdeep Raj, the designer of On Stage Icon Set, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set was created using Photoshop [shape/style based] and contains 256×256px transparent PNG icons and vector and layered PSD sources.

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.

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When searching for web design inspiration it’s easy to get caught up looking at the same portfolios, blogs and the typical sites that appeal to fellow designers. However, as a designer there is a strong need to be able to create a website that truly works for the client and their visitors, not simply a site that fits into our ideals.

From time-to-time it’s helpful to step out from the familiar sources of design inspiration to see what is being used in a particular industry. The music industry is obviously big business, and as artists and record labels struggle to make the transition from declining CD sales to more profitable uses of technology, examining band and artist websites can be a practical learning experience.

You can tell a lot about the band or artist’s target market based on the style of design. You’ll see in the screenshots below that even for those bands with whom you are not familiar, you could probably identify the audience fairly accurately based on the style of the site. Whether the style appeals to us as designers or not is of course not nearly as important as if it appeals to its target audience.

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Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

In this selection we’re glad to present you Aller Sans, Mayberry Pro SemiBold, Quicksand, Agrafa Hairline, Sketch Rockwell, Megalopolis Extra and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.

• Free Fonts Of March features Myndraine, Museo Sans as well as handwritten and grungy fonts.
• 40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design
• You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts.

Nice collection.