Minimal wallpapers refer to desktop wallpapers with a simple design that includes a limited number of objects, lines, designs and colors. Many people like the designs because of their simplicity.

Unlike complex wallpapers, minimal desktop wallpapers meet the usability of the computer user that uses the desktop as a place to save temporary files and recent email attachments. Minimal designs fits well because they are simple and allow the user to clearly see the desktop content without the distraction of a complex design.

Thus, here is a collection of 75 designs of minimal wallpapers with different screen resolutions, you can click on the image to visit the original source site and download the wallpapers.

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People tend to associate Flash content with two things: video and games. But it’s far from being right, as Flash has a great potential and provides a bunch of opportunities to create appealing portfolios, commercial and promotional websites, complex corporate applications, educational websites and even online stores. But there is the other side of the coin, which deals with the Flash website management.

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Working with flash, exporting the SWF, uploading it to the server, testing it, and repeating every-time you change any little thing is very time consuming and frustrating at times. But all these problems disappear if you are working with FlashMoto Flash CMS.

FlashMoto is an advanced Flash content management system that allows Flash developers to develop interactive, media-rich websites and then easily update or enhance them. The end users may take advantage of the ready-made Flash CMS templates, which are already equipped with all necessary modules, slots and tools.

Below is the collection of stunning Flash websites based on FlashMoto CMS. Just take a look at the designs, their implementation and functionality. You will be definitely excited with the opportunities provided by this CMS for Flash.

FlashMoto based portfolios and design studio websites

FlashMoto Flash content management system is in the great demand among photographers, artists, designers and even musicians who are looking for creative interesting ways of presenting their works online. And there is more to it than meets the eye, as FlashMoto is famous for its modern quality Flash galleries, which can be easily edited through the convenient control panel. You simply need to upload images, sort them according to the albums (if there are any), and provide descriptions for them and that’s it! You have a finished fully-functional gallery with stunning animation effects that can also be customized with no coding required.

Below are some of Flash Moto CMS based portfolios, design studio websites and personal websites that are worth visiting:

Honeysbeautylounge.com

The website of a professional Makeup Artist based in TORONTO, Canada.

Bruno-Birkhofer.ch

Bruno Birkhofer Photography

Funnypaper.biz

Established in 2007, Funny Paper is a company of young designers with the motto: “A world made of paper”.

PetraSmolenakova.com

This is a portfolio of Petra Smolenakova, an artist from the Czech Republic. Amazingly, her very first work was on desplay at the Museum of Art in Prague.

DanielKwasniewski.pl

Portfolio of Daniel Kwasniewski, a photographer from Poland.

Glashionista.com

Fashion Photography.

StolkFotografie.nl

The portfolio of Bram Stolk, a photographer from the Netherlands.

NassimGhawidelasgari.com

Personal website of Nassim Ghawidel-Asgari. Nassim has worked in the fashion industry for many years. Her influences draw from experiences travelling the world in pursuit of a pure expression of style and elegance.

FernandoChavez.com.mx

The portfolio of Fernando Chavez, a creative photographer from Mexico.

Studio-fg.ru

The website of Creative Floristic studio.

Rusinov.com

The website of a Russian racing driver, Roman Rusinov.

Business FlashMoto based Websites

The main requirements of the business Flash websites are: clean, well-designed page layouts; good navigation design; clean optimized photos and graphics; the availability of the contact form, pop-up windows and other convenient extras. And all this is provided by Flash Moto CMS as well. One of its nice features is the ‘modules’ that are prebuilt to allow you to easily add video, music, navigation, and even Photo galleries, which will definitely save you some time and frustration since you don’t have to do it from scratch in flash.

Echallan.net

The calm color scheme, the absence of cluttered forms and complex navigation, extreme simplicity and lightness – that’s all about this Flash design that belongs to Purple Purple Infotech Ltd. The balls perform the menu function and look so creative.

Malorca-Flow.com

The website belongs to Malorca Flow, a production company for photoshoots, promotional and commercial photography.

WintechSolution.com

The website presents Juliana Hotel Phnom Penh that has been serving people coming from all around the world.

PixelConcierge.co.uk

This is a website of PixelConcierge, a web development company that provides web design services, logo design, etc.

Elite-Dream.simaer.com

The website belongs to Elite Dreams, a company that provides travels and hosting solutions.

UrbanSmart.net

Provocate.com.au

Brand/eCommerce FlashMoto CMS based websites

Brand and eCommerce websites deserve special attention. Such websites requires a lot of aspects to be taken into consideration, among which are: the ease of use, the creativity, and of course, a professional look. And a lot of Flash developers managed to reach these goals using the FlashMoto Flash CMS. Once you log in to the FlashMoto control panel, you will be surprised with the user interface, which is fairly simple and straightforward. Everything is clearly labeled, and easily changeable! Just take a look at some amazing skillfully done websites powered up by the Flash CMS.

J-b-Nielsen.de

InsightOpticians.co.uk

Established for over 25 years, Insight Opticians prides itself as a trusted and friendly eye-care and eye-wear service.

Silver-Badge.com

Silver Badge is the exclusive importer and distributor of luxury brand products, hand made from design to production.

Grupobeltor.com

The website of a Mexican Shoe company.

Music websites powered up by FlashMoto

Music websites based on Flash Moto CMS are characterized by dynamism and extreme interactivity. They are accompanied by a pleasant music, which can be customized to your taste or turned off at all. This CMS for Flash also provides an advanced Music player with a playlist.

Finmusic.co.uk

UK music distribution for independent artists.

Ahndray.com

The personal website of a talented Mexican singer – Ahndray.

Social websites are the latest advancement in the field of technology. It helps people to form small groups and communicate within that group. This group can be friends, families, colleagues or simply people who share a similar interest. These websites facilitate an online community of users who use it as a forum to discuss topics of common interest.

Social sites helps you to do a whole lot of things than just communicate with others. You can use these sites to promote your business as well. These sites can be used as a means to popularize your business and spread more awareness about your products or services to people around the world.

There are numerous advantages in using social sites to promote your blogs. Firstly, you can reach out to a wider audience without any kind of physical boundaries. You can make use of the huge number of these social site users to advertise your product. The second and most important advantage is that you will promote your blog to the right audience. When you see social sites, you can find your target audience easily and this will help you to reach out to the people who have the highest potential to convert your advertisement into a profitable stream of revenue. Also, this audience will be in a position to better appreciate your efforts and give you the credit and acknowledge that you deserve.

Other than these factors, it gives you a much better chance of finding collaborators for your business. These joint working partnerships can prove to be mutually beneficial to both the parties concerned.  It will also give you a chance to know what the latest trends and you can make the required changes to your business to meet the changing business environment.

Social sites give you an opportunity to start from scratch and build a global business. You can advertise, recruit, manage and work on just about every facet of your business through these social media sites. This also brings down the cost of your marketing and advertising to a considerable extent and all these factors contribute to the success of your business.

Social News Sites

Social news sites are a category of social sites that helps users to submit news stories and website links with the idea of sharing it with others. They can also vote on the news stories to express their likes, dislikes and preferences. These votes help to provide more visibility to any news story. Besides content-based stories, users can also submit pictures, audio or videos. In a nutshell, the users get to decide what news stories can appear in the site. Every user has equal editorial rights in the site.

So, how does it work? Social news sites use an algorithm that take into account many factors such as the relationship of the user to the news story, the discussions and frenzy surrounding the story and the number of votes that it has received to determine the rank and popularity of every news story. It also employs human editors to monitor the content and ensure that adult or malicious content is not posted to the site. They also have programs and algorithms that prevent any user from manipulating these sites to one’s gain.

As a user, one can submit an article or web page directly from the web page to the social news sites by means of icons or links put in place by the owner of the web page. This makes it easy for users to submit content without having to copy the URL of the web page and then pasting it on the site.

In this example, an article in a design blog can be submitted directly to news sites by means of the icons present on the left hand side. This makes it easy for the users to share interesting and informative links easily.

Popular Social News Sites

Some popular social news sites are discussed below:

Reddit:

Reddit is a popular social news site that has a large number of users. It has news on almost every topic that you can think of. For better readability and ease of navigation, the topics have been categorized into health, politics, science and business and each of these categories are called subreddites. The reader can vote up or down using the arrows present on the left hand side of each news snippet and he or she can also write comments for each story.

Digg:

Digg is probably the most popular social news site on the Internet today. It covers a wide range of topics and it even has a separate section for video and images. Users can vote, comment or even have discussions on each link that is posted. They have numerous widgets and buttons that will make it easy for you to integrate it into your website. The popularity of this news site makes it a great tool to generate more traffic to your website. When more users vote or comment on your news story, you have a higher chance of bringing in more traffic to your blog.

StumbleUpon:

This is a great news site to increase traffic to your website over a period of time. It has good potential to maximize brand exposure and reach out to the right audience. It is not an authentic news site, but a combination of social networking and social news site. With this site, you can tag your interests and then click on the button to surf the web for news and information related to your interest. This is a better way to find the news stories that you need, rather than browse through the search engines to identify what you want. Users can also vote on each of these related news stories. One advantage is that the Stumbleupon icon can be installed in the toolbar of the browser and all that the user has to do when he or she comes across an interesting page is to click on the icon in the toolbar. This way, users can share information even from websites that do not have a widget or button.

Slashdot:

Slashdot is primarily intended for tech news and it was probably one of the first social news site that appeared on the Internet. It provides the latest information on any piece of gadget or any technology-related news. It is a one-stop place for the needs of all nerds.

DesignBump:

DesignBump is a social news site that is related to design. It is a great site for anyone who has passion in designing or is a designer himself or herself. This site helps one to keep abreast of the latest trends in the design world.

DesignFloat:

DesignFloat is another popular social news site for designers. They have numerous categories like graphic design, web design, interactive design, industrial design, digital art, photography, motion graphics and even tutorials. One can find interesting posts and articles submitted by like-minded users on this news site.

From these examples, we can differentiate social news sites into two categories. The first category caters to a wider audience and it includes just about any topic while the second category caters to a specific audience that have interest in a certain topic. An example of the first category is Digg or Reddit while an example of the second category is Slashdot or DesignBump or DesignFloat. You can choose the news site that you want depending on your interests.

How can you promote blogs through social news sites?

There are many avenues to promote blogs on social news sites. Its a good idea to use a combination of these methods to popularize your blog and to generate more traffic to your site. The first way is to advertise in these social news sites to reach out to targeted audience. Its better to look for social news sites that cater to a small group of niche audience. For example, if you have a tech-based business, then you can advertise in slashdot or similar news sites that are visited by people who share a common interest in tech-related news and information.

You can use widgets and buttons given by the different social news sites in your web page. This will make it easier for users to submit the link to the news site of their choice. When more number of users submit your link to more news sites, the possibility for traffic increases substantially. It can even give a boost to the search engine rank of your page because more people have visited your site. Your traffic will also increase when more users vote or comment on your link.

However, while doing this ensure that you do not try to manipulate the social news sites. They have many advanced algorithms that can detect this trend and it can backfire. Though your web traffic can also increase when numerous people like your news story or comment on it, you also have to watch out for an unscrupulous method of traffic generation. So, use it wisely and cautiously to generate more traffic to your site.

Conclusion

In short, social news sites are a great means to promote your website and increase the traffic. There are numerous social news sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon that can help you to popularize your business. However, you have to ensure that you do not resort to manipulative and artificial techniques to achieve this purpose. It should be genuine and realistic for a long-lasting effort.

The first email or phone call you receive to notify you of a project is also the first indirect contact between you and the client. This initial step includes basic information about the project that you may need to know to continue the conversation with the client and start the project consequently or simply decline with a gentle apology.

The input you receive from the client is the most important piece of information you depend on to create a design that meets with their requirements. Clever designers don’t just take what the client tells them and gets started; instead he or she should seek what is behind the product information or the content that will need to be added to the project.  To gain a bigger picture of the project, you should learn how to understand the client and what is behind their words and expressions. In most cases, clients do not have experience in the design business so the project owner will struggle to express what he or she really needs such as using specific style or colors and in many cases the customer does not know the best solution for the design, this will require you to provide advice and options to serve the project marketing and end users needs.

Since collecting data is the first step in the design process, it is important to gather every necessary piece of information regarding the project before you put your designs on paper. This initial meeting with the customer can decide if the project will flow smoothly with less time and budget waste in doing major modifications as well as a lot of comments, especially when it is the first time dealing with the client.

Designing like a marketing person

Image by shutterstock

At this early stage in the project, you jump from your main career area to the marketing side and play the role of the marketing person for the project. Even if the company is too large and prevents you from meeting with the client directly, it would be an initial meeting where you meet with the project manager, marketing manager or a person who has direct contact with the customer.

While your design plays an important role in the products marketing, it is important to be involved in the marketing process and to make sure that your design won’t stand as a hard rock in the face of success of the project and meet with its requirements. At this point, you are acting like a marketing person who determines the creative direction for the design that will meet with the projects market.

In the first meeting with the client, it is important to listen to the client, what are the ideas running through his or her head before starting to steer the conversation to get more information.

Although this is not a real design step as you’re still getting the information, I would consider it a part of the design because it’s important for putting the design together. You have to meet the client with two faces, you approach the client with the marketing face that would like to convince the client to follow specific design styles or get a better idea as to whether the client has one in mind and how he envisions it.

In many cases, the client may spoil the creative idea because of their lack of design skills and creative vision. While the design may flow just perfectly, some suggestions or ideas can flip the design to become an ugly experience instead of a creative one. This happens mostly when the client is new and does not depend entirely on the designer’s vision.

Reading your client

While understanding your client is a matter of time and experience, you can read what is behind the client’s words and understand what is required, even if he or she did not know how to express these needs in the designer’s language.

Reading your client involves many issues such as listening carefully to the project requirements and the ideas and thoughts, learning from the client’s information and the background you have such as the business type, scale, previous artwork done for the business and the customer as well. In addition to this data, you will get more information by simply asking the contact person questions to educate your talent and start thinking of ideas for the project.

Questions you should ask

Image by shutterstock

There are some questions that you should ask the project owner or manager about the design expectations and requirements. These questions depend on the project type, end-user, output and the client.

The following examples show some information you may ask about to get a better idea about the project:

• The company logo, color scheme, design style on the website, corporate identity, and if the client wants to follow it or change the colors and the design style from the existing one.
• The type of business and how to choose the design style that meets with the business field
• The project output. Will the project be a website, brochure, desktop application, etc…
• If the client would like to have a similar design style to an existing one such as an existing site.
• The functions that the need to be added to the project
• The marketing concept behind the project
• The audience, this helps to create a design that meets with the audiences’ needs and becomes user friendly.

Although there are common questions that you need to ask the customer, there are other questions that are more related to the project type and change based on each project’s circumstances.

Questions you should NOT ask

While asking questions is an important step to get more information about the design process, they should be asked wisely because some questions may cause instead of a helpful meeting with precise steps to follow the design.

Unwanted questions can be similar to giving more options after setting one of the topics such as color examples after determining the color scheme of the design. On the other hand, some questions may get the customer involved more than usual in the design process, this ends up with either a conflict between the designer and the client or ends up with a design that isn’t compatible with the creative direction of the project or the end-users’ needs.

Therefore, it is important to be careful about the questions you ask the client, it should be directed and useful in the design process.

Client feedback checklist

Image by shutterstock
One of the most important documents that you can depend on to summarize the client’s feedback about the project or even take with you to let the client fill in is the design feedback checklist.  This checklist organizes the design input and thoughts about the design and how he or she expects the design to look.  Although you can directly give it to the client to fill in, it is important to fill it in by yourself as a designer to better understand what it reflects.

The feedback checklist is also helpful to transfer the creative vision when you have a team of designers that are working on the same project; it makes sure that everyone is following the correct information with a unified style and output.

Similar to the question list, the checklist can include the following information:

• The Project type, it can be website, printing project, logo design …etc.
• The color scheme of the project.
• The target audience, they can be business people, kids or young girls …etc.
• The corporate identity and design style
• The required design style
• An example of a similar project
• Examples of the competitors designs
• The number of mock-ups and options
• The project content, text, images and video
• The functions that will be added visualized in the design
• The number of designs required for the project
• The technology that will be used in the project and its versions
• The output format and restrictions such as the image sizes for the website design.
• The project timing and delivery

How the client meeting affects the design process

Image by shutterstock

Gathering this information builds knowledge about how the design and creative process will flow based on the client type and the project requirements. For example, the client may require different design mock-ups before choosing the best fit, in this case, you will need to either create two design mock-ups or let two designers with different styles work on creating the mock-up.

Also, in some projects, the client may like to see a drafted version with only outline for how the design is constructed. However, it is important to analyze the data collected through the meeting and in the feedback checklist to determine the best design process workflow that compliments these requirements.

Conclusion

Understanding the client is the most important step in your design workflow as it determines the success of the project and prevents a lot of wasted time and money through going in wrong creative directions.  Therefore it is useful to have good skills to gather all the possible information from the client or the contact person to be able to ensure the success of the design project.  Having some marking skills such as how to negotiate with the client, asking the right questions and getting organized feedback are required to serve the creative process.

Although experience is very important in this, you can still get the most out of the client meeting through the guidelines above and using the feedback checklist.

Learning Photoshop is not limited to take a Photoshop course or read a Photoshop book. It is an extended application with flexible to create amazing effects on photos. So, you need to update your knowledge frequently with the new tips and tricks.

Although, Photoshop has been developed alot to create many graphic tasks such as web design, printing, video and 3D, it is known as a powerful tool that let you create photo effects and manipulation based on your skills and the tricks you learn.

Articles are one of the great resources that you can use to update your skills with new tips and tricks that are published everyday. Here are some Photoshop tutorials that focus on the photo manipulation and creating digital art effects on the photos. Each tutorial has new tricks that you can learn and apply it to your own designs.

If you like the tutorials below, you may like to check the these as well:

• Photo Manipulate Tutorial Using Photoshop
• Creative Image Coloring Photoshop Tutorial
• Man and Earth Photoshop Tutorial
• 30+ Stunning How-to Photoshop Tutorials

Midnight Magic

Adding Light Streaks To A Photo

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to look at how to add colorful streaks of light to a photo. You’ve probably seen these light streaks used in ads for everything from shampoo to cellphones, and in fact they were used most recently in a cool ad for a new cellphone from Sprint and Samsung.

Interweaving Photo Strips

In this Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create an interesting photo effect by taking an image and turning it into a series of interweaving strips.

Design a Professional Laptop Advert

This tutorial will teach you how to manually create your own vanishing points, and how to use these techniques to create an awesome ’screen explosion’ effect – something that is sure to dazzle your viewers!

Create a Stylish Two-Tone Photo Montage

Learn how to combine several photos to create a stylish two-tone composition.

Fantastic Tree

Speedy Shatter Effects

This technique, which its creator Eric Sin calls the ‘layer duplication effect’, is perfect for creatives who need to spice up a photo in a hurry.

Create a Powerful Mental Wave Explosion Effect

Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effects in Photoshop

Fairy Night

This task we’ll learn how to correct the photos’ colors, change the eyes color, work with the layers, applying ready brushes and designs, create your own design and to picture the stars.

Light In The Forest Photo Effect

Water effect photo montage

Create Beautiful Abstract Female Art in Photoshop

Snail Race Photo Montage

Create a Surreal Turtle Image

This tutorial shows the creation of one of my images. It shows how I adjust lighting and colours in my images to create this surrealistic turtle. Hopefully, you’ll be able to transfer these methods to your own work.

Creating Energy Spheres in Photoshop

Create an amazing Ad in Photoshop

Fairy night. Beanstalk

Give Your Photos Awesome Lighting in Just 10 Steps!

This tutorial will teach you how to give your photos amazing lighting effects that really make them pop. Best of all the techniques are covered in just 10 steps, making ordinary to amazing a simple transition!

Design a Coldplay/Apple Inspired Portrait in Photoshop

Selective Sepia

Learn how to use Photoshop to create selectively add a dramatic sepia effect a photo. This Photoshop effect works best when used with Photoshop CS3 but will also work with Photoshop CS2 or older using an alternative method.

Cute Flying Hippo

Creating a Vector Composite Effect from a Photo

This tutorial will demonstrate how to take an image, in this case a woman’s face, and give the appearance that it is entirely composed of vector shapes. Along the way, we’ll use some fairly basic techniques, including clipping masks and displacement maps, to achieve a unique effect!

Transform Your Doodles Into Art

Create Breathtaking Fantasy Light Effects

Create an Adrenaline Filled Car Chase Scene

How to Create a Piece of Heaven in Photoshop

Adding Sunlight Through The Trees

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to add beams of sunlight through trees, which is not only a great way to make an image look more interesting, it’s also a lot easier to do than you might think, as we’ll see.

How to Create a Flaming Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial, we’ll manipulate a picture so it looks like a woman burning in flames. The idea behind this manipulation was to create a nice looking illustration, only by using simple techniques and tools such as the Brush tool and Warp command. I hope you enjoy the tutorial and try it with your own stock imagery.

How to Create a Flying Land Illustration on Fire

Dark and Eerie Photo Manipulation Scene

In this Photo-manipulation tutorial, we will learn how to create a dark photo manipulation scene with an eerie yet magical atmosphere.

Google Map Parody Photo Manipulation

In this photo-manipulation tutorial we will learn how to create an image parody of Google Maps© which features an aerial view of a city with tacks placed on various areas of the map. We will learn how to blend images seamlessly by adjusting their colors, their blending modes, and their opacity levels.

Combine Photo Elements to Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation

This Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to use a variety of color, lighting, and cut and paste techniques to create a surreal photo manipulation. Combine your creativity with these Photoshop techniques to create your own photo manipulation artworks.

Make an Apple Coldplay Style Ad in Photoshop

Electrifying Energy Beams

Here’s a great effect that will bring some energy to your subject. We’ll be wrapping this singer’s arm with a glowing beam of light, adding sparkles, and adjusting the colors to make it all seem magical.

Mysterious Hollow