This article showcases the most beautiful website designs from the North American sports industry, including ones for news, teams and leagues, sports apparel and more.

Trends In Sports Websites

As in any industry, sports websites have their own trends, as you will see below. However, because the websites showcased here fall into a number of different categories and serve different purposes, not all of the trends we discuss will be relevant or applicable to all types of sports websites.

1. Large Photos
Many of the best sports websites include a lot of images and photos, and many use large photos in the background or a featured area. News websites obviously include a lot of smaller photos to accompany current stories, but team websites and sports apparel websites in particular often rely on large photos as a prominent part of their design.

Good Tab Based Navigation

ExpressionEngine
This tab set is beautifully styled. It uses a bevel to seperate tabs, large buttons, and clean typography with icons.

Astratos
Another tab navigation that is clean because of rounded corners and use of a gradient to style.

WorldCat
Rounded corners and clean separation.

Veer
These tabs have beautiful styling. Notice the use of different colors and a drop shadow for separation purposes.

365 Days of Astronomy
Use of different colors and a drop shadow to separate the tabs not in use.

Wire & Twine
This is some excellent texture use with a clean layout.

Komodo
A good example of tabs used in a module.

Inkd
Good styling and usable because of size and separation.

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

1. Subliminal Suggestion

Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others. The cap embodied the concept of sharing and giving in their minds, and exposure to it primed them for regarding sharing more positively. The same study also exposed kids to a “Toys ‘R’ Us” logo, which had the opposite effect of the Santa Claus cap, making them less likely to share their candy.

Below you’ll find a collection of 40 more beautiful and creative logo designs to inspire you. Browsing through the showcase, you will notice many trends. Some of these include the usage of simple shapes to create something complex, origami shapes, coloring and transparency trends, and many more.

40 Creative Logo Designs

About the author

Matt Cronin is a freelance web and graphic designer as well as developer. He is the author and owner of Spoonfed Design, a design blog with great tips, how-to, inspiration, tutorials, and more. Spoonfed Design is part of the VAEOU Creative Network, a new startup in progress with new services coming soon.

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by Noura Yehia

As the Web grows and becomes more dynamic, more and more websites have user-generated content and tools that greatly improve the user experience in terms of usability and accessibility.

Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, upload, auto-complete, image cropping, slideshows, tool tips, sliders and tables are being developed that use nifty JavaScript and AJAX scripts.

When using these, developers have to carefully consider many subtle techniques to help users get things done. In this article, we present 70 new and useful JavaScript and AJAX techniques, all of which are of the highest quality and are more or less easy to configure. You will also find some very useful but better known techniques to use on almost any project you work on.

jQuery, MooTools, Prototype and script.aculo.us are used in these examples, so every taste gets its due.

Photoshop’s text and layer tools can be used to create some really awesome effects. We’ve put together a list of 60 of the best tutorials we could find to help you stay up to date on the latest trends and techniques. You’ll find some really cool grunge and glass styles (plus a few surprises!) and learn how some of the best designers create their unique effects.

Courtesy: LemonDesign

Instead of listing 100 plus tutorials that you’ll bookmark never to come back, we’ve decided to take you through the basics of typography, hopefully inspiring and then teaching you. Typography is an art just like any other. You have to feel the form, admire the curves and connect with the flow.

Introduction to Typography

In website design, there are an endless amount of possibilities, styles and techniques that can be used to make a beautiful design that flows with the content. One of these styles is an illustration-heavy layout, which can take a website to a whole new level. Illustrations are becoming more and more popular, and some designers are really pushing the limits with some beautiful ones.

Below you’ll find 40 designs that feature skillful and beautiful illustrations, integrated properly to create a visually pleasing style.

Beautiful Illustrations In Web Designs

DivVoted
An all-around beautiful layout, with some beautifully colored illustrations to accompany it.

The Alamo Basement
A nice, colorful illustration that has a comforting air.

StrawPoll
StrawPoll has a beautifully illustrated landscape, with an extremely clever layout.

Green Globe Ideas
A high-quality and very creative illustration in the header.

By Daved Brosche, Naveed Javaid and Smashing Editorial Team

When it comes to freebie designs, beautiful icons sets are tops. Designers scour for these free treasures more than anything else. You can use icon sets in Web applications, website designs and on your desktop. If well designed, they make a great impression on others. Beautifully designed icons also prove the quality of a designer’s work, so many designers make theirs freely available online, thus giving their work more exposure.

In the overview below, we present 50 beautifully designed, free and professional high-quality icons for desktop and Web design. All of them can be freely used for private projects, and some are available for commercial use as well. Regardless, always read the licenses — they may change from time to time.

You can also scan through our other icon-related articles:

• 40 Professional Icon Sets for Free Download
  Download some fresh, professional icon goodies.

A photoblog is a very specific type of blog. Its focus is photography, and there are typically few words beyond a caption and comments. Photoblogs are easy to set up and maintain, and they make great photo galleries for photographers who are put off by the complexity of HTML coding or installing a CMS such as WordPress.

It’s because of this simplicity, not to mention the development of free yet sophisticated tools like Pixelpost, that photoblogging has exploded in popularity over the last few years. Photoblogs.org, for example, lists over 32,000 photoblogs! That’s a lot of photos, and a lot of photographers vying for your attention.

Dedicated as ever to making your life easier, we’ve handpicked over 50 brilliant photoblogs for your viewing pleasure. There’s a little of everything, including photojournalism and nature, landscape, street, portrait and travel photography. We’ve also listed some of the best photoblogging solutions, articles and other resources at the bottom of the post.