How do I win?

We will be randomly selecting two people that retweet this, mention it on our Facebook page and/or leave a comment on this post. The grand prize winner will receive BOTH of the Theme Snack themes currently available (Foliotastic and Phototastic). The runner-up will receive their choice of one(1) theme. Winners will be announced Monday, March 15th!

Phototastic
View the Demo

Foliotastic
View the Demo

Both winners will be receiving their theme(s) with a developer license (worth $179), meaning you can reuse the theme(s) for an unlimited number of sites AND receive updates until the next major version is released.

Good luck to all!

Take the following ideas we’ve come up with into consideration and let us know what your favorites are. But more importantly, add your own suggestions!

Some of our ideas:

1. Twitter/Facebook integration to sign in and push your portfolio entries onto your social platforms.
2. We’d like to actually put points to use and offer trade-in awards (double-votes, free ad space).
3. A Design Snack API to display your portfolio and other stats on an external site.
4. Sponsored contests to win great stuff like computer hardware, software, gift cards, etc.
5. An iPhone/Android app is in the planning stages, what would you like to see here?

Winners will be announced March 15th!

It only makes sense that a website producing such an incredible amount of great content would decide to compile and publish a book. My expectations in the beginning were mediocre at best; I wasn’t sure how a website producing content that almost required you to be at a computer (a lot of articles consisted of external links and examples) would create an equally content-rich book. When I got this particular book in the mail; I was surprised, excited and more importantly—proven absolutely wrong.

Binding, Paper & Print Quality

A beautiful book. Let’s me say this right out of the gate: This book is gorgeous. That was literally my first thought when I got mine. The front is very simple with the logo blown up past the edges of the cover. The thickness of the paper stock and the strength of the binding makes it feel very solid for a paperback book. The pages themselves are a very high-quality stock as well. There’s a slight satin finish giving them a slightly glossy feel, but definitely not too glossy. All of this, combined with the very vibrant print quality, makes The Smashing Book a fantastic looking book.

QUICK NOTE: If you got the first edition of this book you’ll notice that the binding and print margins were incredibly bad. I had to pull the book open to see the rest of the content buried in the margin of the book, causing the pages to start falling out. I assure you though, the new edition has fixed both of these issues and the book is holding up much better!

The Smashing Content

Super-rich and detailed. Enough about what it looks like, let’s get to the meat of this thing. If you’re anything like me, you immediately read/retweet almost every article that Smashing Magazine produces. Each one of them is rich with inspiration and content and the book does not disappoint in this respect. If I could pick one major aspect about the book that is different than the website, it’s that the website is very focused on inspiration while The Smashing Book focuses almost entirely on educating.

Design and usability. The first half of the book (about 170 pages) is all about design and usability. User interface design, CSS layouts, typography, usability principles and a huge guide about color usage. All of these chapters are rich and informative; I found myself highlighting some great snippets of information (something I haven’t done in years).

Optimization & branding. A lot of the second half of the book (about 60 pages) focuses on optimization, conversion rates and branding. This is an excellent guide if you’re looking to create something similar to a Smashing Magazine or other business-centric online brand. My only complaint with this section is that they don’t put too much emphasis on social media. Being that it’s growing at an incredible rate and such a huge part of most of our lives these days, it would be nice to have some kind of social networking guide when it comes to branding and optimization. That of course could be a whole book by itself.

Interviews and insights. Another large part of the book gets into interviews and insights, which was actually one of my favorite parts. I love hearing from fellow designers and developers; hearing their stories and learning from their accomplishments and mistakes. Almost thirty pages of questions and answers really helps this book become more real. Reading these intelligent responses from so many great people makes you feel like your part of something bigger, something more than just reading a great book.

The Smashing story. And then interestingly enough, the end of the book tells the story of the beginning. The Smashing Magazine story is incredibly entertaining; particularly because they didn’t even mean to create something as big as they did. I won’t spoil the good parts, but it’s definitely worth a read-through at least once.

Final Thoughts

If someone were to ask me today: “What book would you recommend to me if I wanted to improve my skills as a designer?”, I would absolutely recommend The Smashing Book. This isn’t necessarily a book for absolute beginners because it doesn’t teach you how to be a designer—which would be impossible. What it does do is gives you the knowledge, recommendations and examples you need to become a better one.

I’ve been designing and developing for over 15 years now and like I mentioned before; I was highlighting sections of the book that I found insightful and interesting. Some of the information I had never thought of or seen anywhere else. If you are a designer, beginner or advanced; I cannot recommend this book more. It deserves to be on every designer’s bookshelf.

You can purchase The Smashing Book for $29.90 from Smashing Magazine’s site: http://bit.ly/9p7JZD

Here’s my list of five really great Flash-powered sites from the recent gallery entries. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what other amazing Flash sites you’ve seen around the web lately.

GetInvision
http://www.getin.cn

While the portfolio navigation may take a minute or two to get used to, it’s hard to pull yourself away from this one once you start browsing.

I-Creativ Studio
http://i-creativ.net

With its large format display, ease of browsing (you can use the keyboard), and a clean interface make this an inspiration to us all.

MHi Interactive
http://www.mhinteractive.com

A clean, sleek interface with some great smooth animation make MHi a breeze to browse.

DJNR Interactive Portfolio
http://www.djnr.net

Easily my second runner up and a thrill to browse. Between the great music and the incredibly sleek and intuitive interface, it’s easy to kill some time here.

LogicBomb Media
http://www.logicbombmedia.com

My absolute favorite of the bunch that makes such an incredible use of the Flash camera capabilities. Move your head around and watch the three-dimensional illustrations come alive with smoothly animated perspective changes.

Photostatic is a dark photo-centric theme with many built-in plugins and customizations.  The dark canvas of the theme’s layout allows users to feature their photos and portfolio items in a way that accentuates the unique colors of the images.  Phototastic also provides a generous amount of features including a dynamic featured slider, visual dropdowns, beautiful gallery views, informative detail view, contact form styling and a custom admin panel.

You can customize anything from the logo to choosing a highlight color with a hex color picker. There are also two category template styles to choose from: a blog style and a gallery style.

Gallery: List View

With the purchase of Phototastic also comes an eight page PDF Document with screenshots and step-by-step instructions to help the user easily configure and install Phototastic.

ThemeSnack also offers Foliotastic, another premium portfolio WordPress theme.  Foliotastic is a feature-rich portfolio/blog theme that also includes a full-featured, tabbed admin panel to change numerous options like colors, category settings, logo settings and more. With its ultra-clean layout, Foliotastic provides you with a theme that is extremely easy to install and setup.

Pricing and Availability

Phototastic is now available for purchase on the ThemeSnack website, for $79 (single-use license, $199 for multi-use).  In addition to Phototastic, Foliotastic, is also available for purchase on their website at the same price-points.  To purchase or view demos of either Phototastic or Foliotastic, check out ThemeSnack.com.

About ThemeSnack

ThemeSnack is a premium WordPress theme workshop, focused on bringing high quality themes to creative people. Our products are great looking, powerful and fully featured. Backed up with a complete support service, you can be sure you’ll have the help you need after your purchase.  For more information, visit the ThemeSnack website.

Here’s a list of five really great jQuery-powered sites I’ve seen recently. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what other amazing sites you’ve seen around the web.

Zaum & Brown
http://www.zaum.co.uk

Don’t let the simplicity fool you, load this one up and play with the window size. Prepare to be amazed.

Webalon
http://webalon.com

Great, big image slider on this one. And yes, it gets bigger when you enlarge the window. Way cool.

MetaLab
http://www.metalabdesign.com

A clean, sleek interface topped off with the great jQuery powered horizontal and vertical slider.

Fully Illustrated
http://www.fullyillustrated.com

Love the navigation glow effect and the blocky slider is very sleek.

Authentic Jobs
http://www.authenticjobs.com

A grungy, yet super-clean site that makes great use of jQuery by powering their job search with it.

I found myself clicking around all of the sites, just to see what gems of animation or graphic effects I would uncover. Just take a look at some of their work below, or visit Otterball’s profile to see them all.

From here on out, when you add a portfolio item, it will stay in your portfolio. However, if it does not receive enough positive feedback to push it to the “Top Rated” section, it will simply “disappear” from the gallery — but still be viewable from your profile. When you link directly to your item’s detail page, you can be assured that the link won’t just stop working at some point because of a low score.

Hopefully, this will make a lot people very happy, as we’ve had some item deletions over the last 2 weeks that would have, and should have put this new system to good use. To those that lost their portfolio items due to low scoring, simply resubmit and they won’t be lost again. Promise!

Check out some screens below and then go vote it up!

While we certainly can’t showcase all of them, we’d like to give kudos to some of our top favorites. We picked these 6 galleries based on design aesthetic, quality of content and overall usability.

Best Web Gallery

http://bestwebgallery.com

Constantly updated and the dark design really makes the gallery pop. I love the UI elements on this one as well. The view switcher is a really nice touch.

Creattica
http://creattica.com

It’s an Envato site, so of course the design is pristine. The interface is clean and very “white-spacey”. I absolutely love the huge custom font type.

We Love CSS

http://welovecss.net

From what I can tell by the archives, this one has been around since June 2009. For being such a new site though, it has everything I like in a design showcase. And the layout is eerily similar to another site I know, so that helps too.

Design Bombs

http://designbombs.com

You have to admit, this one is just cool. The design concept alone is brilliant, but the fact that they follow through with some great content, you can’t get much better from an inspiration outlet.

Design Flavr

http://designflavr.com

This one screams usability. I love the gallery itself and the tabbed sidebar interface is super helpful. I’ll be the first to admit I am getting some inspiration from this one for future Design Snack updates.

The CSS Awards

http://thecssawards.com

I found this one recently while browsing around for inspiration (as I do almost every day) and just love the impact it has on first load. Sure there’s a lot of “noise” when you first lay your eyes on it, but it’s a neat way to derive inspiration. By casually glancing at all of the little thumbnails until something catches your eye.

What do you think?

What are some of your personal favorites (aside from Design Snack, of course) that you visit on a regular basis? I’d love to find some new ones to add to my daily inspiration list.