BlogmyQuery – BMQ

By Cameron Chapman

Propaganda is often thought of in negative terms. It evokes thoughts of wartime and misinformation campaigns by governments trying to deceive people or bolster support for what might otherwise be unpopular policies. But propaganda and the techniques it uses are prominent throughout our modern lives.

Every time you see a political poster, you’re seeing propaganda. Advertising in all forms almost always uses at least some of the usual techniques used by propagandists. Virtually anything created to persuade a person to do a certain thing or think a certain way has roots in propaganda.

As designers, it’s important that we understand the principles behind propaganda and the way it’s designed if we want to create more effective designs. After all, most designs are created with the end goal of getting people to take specific actions. Even if your designs don’t outwardly resemble propaganda, incorporating the techniques and principles behind successful propaganda pieces can greatly improve the effectiveness of your designs.

Background Information

It’s important, when studying propaganda design or designing your own propaganda, to have a basic understanding of what ‘propaganda’ actually means and what its goals are. The resources below have some excellent background information.

Propaganda Critic
This is a great primer site on propaganda. It covers common techniques, wartime propaganda, and modern examples.

What is Propaganda
Another analysis of what propaganda is and how it works:

Inspiration

Before we get into any propaganda design tutorials and resources, let’s take a look at some propaganda from the past hundred or so years. Below are collections of propaganda from around the world, most of it war-related. There’s also a section of fictional propaganda, mostly created around pop culture.

Amazing Propaganda Posters
This post from Oddee offers up a bunch of examples of propaganda posters from around the world. Included are WWI and WWII, posters from Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile, and even modern propaganda posters from the last ten years.

Propaganda Posters: United States of America
This gallery from FirstWorldWar.com offers a ton of propaganda posters from the US used during WWI. There are roughly 400 posters included in the collection.

Propaganda, Posters and Postcards
This site offers up propaganda posters from around the world, mostly from WWI and WWII, thought some date from before and after.

‘Unintentional’ Propaganda Posters
This post from Cracked.com pokes fun at a number of propaganda posters from around the world. It provides great examples of what not to do when designing propaganda.

“Welcome to your new apartment!”

WWII: Intense Propaganda Posters
This collection from LIFE magazine includes some of the most graphic and intense propaganda posters from both sides created during WWII.

Soviet Posters: Revolution by Design
The International Poster Gallery offers not only a collection of Soviet propaganda posters, but also a fairly extensive history of the time periods in which the posters originated. The posters on the site are all for sale.

Powerful Messages: Inspirational World War II Propaganda Posters
This short roundup from The Inspiration Blog showcases some very high-quality propaganda posters from WWII, all from the Allied countries.

Propaganda Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters
Here’s another roundup of Soviet propaganda posters, with a bit of explanation for each one.

We Love Propaganda
Here’s a Flickr set that’s filled with propaganda posters from around the world. There are more than 500 images included.

Propaganda Inspired by Pop Culture

The propaganda posters here are based on video games, TV shows, and movies, but display many of the same characteristics of real-world propaganda designs.

Propaganda Posters, Showcase of Dramatic Artwork
The posters here have been created by graphic designers from all over the world. Some are based on fiction but others are based on previous real-world conflicts (and some combine the two).

Victory…
Here’s a propaganda poster created based on the Dalek race from the TV series Doctor Who. It’s designed in a style that would fit right in among WWII era posters.

Incredible Star Wars Propaganda Posters
Star Wars has been such a huge part of popular culture since it debuted in the 70s, that of course there would be propaganda posters created to exist within its world. There are posters here from both sides: the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.

Propagit – Propaganda and Agitation Posters
This roundup from Abduzeedo features Soviet-style propaganda posters designed by Propagit (The Department of Propaganda and Agitation).

Tutorials and Techniques

The tutorials featured below teach you how to create mostly vintage-style propaganda posters, reminiscent of posters created during WWII.

Design Tutorial: Creating a Propaganda Poster
This tutorial walks you through step-by-step instructions for creating this Hope is the New Black poster in Photoshop.

Create a Constructivist Inspired Poster
This Photosohp tutorial from Psdtuts+ shows you how to create this poster in the style of Russian Constructivism.

Create an Inspirational Vector Political Poster
This Illustrator tutorial shows how to create an Obama Hope-style political poster.

How to Create a WWII Propaganda Poster in Photoshop
This tutorial shows how to create a patriotic WWII War Bonds poster.

Constructivist Propaganda Poster
Here’s another tutorial for creating a Russian Constructivist-style poster, this time based around the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign.

Make a Russian Propaganda Poster in Photoshop
This tutorial shows how to create a Russian-style propaganda poster in Photoshop using filters, shapes, and other tools.

Create a Retro Style Poster with Shapes, Patterns, and Eagles
While not strictly a propaganda poster, the imagery is definitely in line with traditional propaganda design in the poster in this Illustrator tutorial from Vectortuts+. Just add a propaganda message and it would fit right in with posters from WWII and the Cold War era.

Tools and Resources

Here are some tools and resources for creating your own propaganda-style artwork and designs.

American Propaganda Fontpack
This fontpack from Chank includes more than a dozen fonts reminiscent of those commonly seen on propaganda posters. The only downside is that it’s $99.

Propaganda Font
A free, slightly-distressed free font from DaFont.com.

Grunge Textures
Many propaganda posters, especially those that are meant to look vintage, make use of grungy textures to give a more authentic look. This site offers up more than 1400 free grunge textures.

Australian War Memorial Collection
A lot of propaganda designs use military imagery. This collection of photos from the Australian War Memorial is available through Flickr’s The Commons project.

World War I Panoramas
This collection of panoramic photos from The Library of Congress is available through Flickr’s The Commons.

Dafont.com Russian Fonts
DaFont has a number of Cyrillic-style fonts, perfect for a Russian or Soviet-inspired propaganda design.

FontSpace Propaganda Fonts
FontSpace has a small collection of interesting fonts for propaganda design, including some really great symbol fonts with appropriate imagery.

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In this modern era you can very well stumble across quality animated slideshow scripts, but how can we design a good slideshow interface to use these scripts on?

In this article we’ll analyze the current design trend when it comes to slideshows. We’ll start by taking a look at common uses of slideshows but also alternative and creative solutions. As you probably know, we can define a slideshow as a collection of items that can slide within a container. The content of every slide will be revealed for a fixed amount of time within the container.

A slideshow is a great solution to save space in a web layout and to catch the user’s eye with animations. Since slideshow scripts for popular javascript libraries are everywhere, this technique is becoming a little bit overused. This is the reason why, we would like to show you how you can still use a slideshow to make your website stand out without falling into mediocrity.

The Standard Slideshow

The first example is dedicated to the standard slideshow pattern. As you can see from the picture, it’s an animated slideshow with a non numbered navigation. Although this is the most utilized slideshow pattern of all, let’s try to understand why this example stands above the rest. First off, the animation is not a common fade or slide. It’s a slide with a subtle easing, that gives to the animation a personal look.

There’s a lot of space around the slideshow and the controls that creates a very elegant and subtle feel. The last important detail is the number of slides. By using a small amount of slides you’ll be able to ensure that all the slides will be viewed. If you use too many slides the user will be probably be repelled.

The Left/Right Slideshow

This is another very common slideshow pattern in web design. The container shows a fixed number of slides and the left and right controls make it possible to scroll left or right and reveal the next slides. Apart from the websites great design, there’s a detail in this example that makes this slideshow uncommon: the image at the center will never slide.

Your users are not expecting it and it’s a detail that you’ll never forget. Basically when you scroll left or right, in a normal slideshow all the three images will scroll in the selected direction. In this case the featured project in the center will remain in the same position, and the three slides will scroll behind it. If you take a look at the website you can delve into it and understand why it’s so different.

Another stand-alone detail is the slide up effect that every project name has. If you click on a project name, the description will slide up, without the necessity to go to the actual project page. It’s a slideshow with a different approach and an internal slide up effect. This is a great example of how it’s possible to use a common design pattern and take it to another level.

Different Location Slideshow

This pattern was very common when the first version of Flash became readily available. When you click on an element, something changes in another part of the website. In these days it seems to be less popular, but it could be useful in some cases. If you take a look at our example, when you click on the thumbnail images at the bottom of the page, the main image will be revealed in the iPhone illustration.

This is a clever slideshow example. The designer probably needed to show some screenshots of the iPhone app, and instead of using an overused lightbox effect (that is what the user probably expects) found the solution to show the screenshots directly in the iPhone illustration.

This approach has two main goals: avoiding images overlay and showing the screenshots in their real environment, an iPhone. When you click on the thumbnails you get the feeling that you’re currently seeing the real application on the iPhone, and you can better understand how the application works. When you use a screenshot outside the context (the iPhone in this case), it’s not so immediate for the user to understand it.

The Hover Slideshow Effect

This is another really common slideshow pattern that uses a small amount of space withiin the area of design. It can also relay quite a bit of information if you hover over the labels. In this particular example from Threadless, hovering over the labels will show an image related to that specific label.

If you click on the label you’ll be redirected to the right section of the website. It’s like a navigation menu with more information associated to the menu item. There’s a big debate on the Internet these days on subject matter of hover effects and hiding information beneath hovering.

The reason why these techniques are so discussed is that in touchscreen devices like the iPad or the iPhone there are no hover states. If this is true, it’s also true when you tap on an element containing a hover effect, the information will be shown on devices such as the iPad. And at the second tap you’ll be taken to the link specified. Point being, you shouldn’t avoid hover effects because you believe mobile devices do not have the capability of supporting them, as this is untrue.

The Full Screen Slideshow

Now we’re entering to the top chart zone. This is an example of one of the best full screen slideshow ever designed. You have two arrows at the top right corner of the website and when you click on one of them, the entire product page will shift and slide, revealing yet another product. This is beautifully designed and it gives the feeling as though you’re purchasing the product from a live store.

If you don’t immediately warm to the slideshow idea, there’s always a normal menu at the top left corner that will let you navigate between products within the slideshow. The combination of a great slideshow and a menu fallback is a state of the art full screen slideshow.

Numbered Slideshows

We’re closing this article with a great example of all previous patterns combined in one slideshow. Take a look at the screenshot to understand the power and simplicity of this approach. The slideshow on this page is the entire website. You have multiple controls, the left/right arrows and the numbered controls at the bottom.

After the numbered controls you have the website menu items, that will show the content of every section directly in the slideshow viewport. It’s the perfect slideshow. You can’t miss a section of the website, the navigation is clear, you’ll be totally captured by the slideshow and after navigating through it you visited the entire website.

Today we are glad to release a Payment Icon Set, a set with 18 payment icons in PNG format, in the resolutions 32×32px — 128×128px. This set was designed by Phil Matthews and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

The icons are inteded to be used on e-commerce websites where you can show what types of payment the shop accepts. Each icon comes in curved and straight edge variations. As usual, the set is free to use in private and commercial projects — no credit is required.

Download the icon set for free!

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 or rented. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• preview
• download the icon set for free (zip, 0.8 Mb)

Behind the design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

This icon pack includes 18 different payment icons in PNG format. These icons are released free of charge and can be used without credit. The icons cannot be resold in any way. The copyright of each logo is owned by the respective payment company and I do not take responsibility for any part of the design of these. They are inteded for you to show what types of payment your website accepts. Please spread the word if you like this icon set or find it useful. Thank you.

— Phil Mathews

Thank you very much, Phil! We really appreciate your efforts.

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: credit card, Freebies, Icons, payment

By Robert Bowen

Many of our readers are constantly talking about the burden that weighs on their days stemming from an overflowing inbox. Day in and day out they are receiving such a high volume of e-mails that this communication tool becomes too cumbersome to remain effective, and instead begins to border on frustrating. As this mass of mail becomes unmanaged, we are potentially falling behind on our workload.

Not only that, but the longer we leave the mass gathering and collecting countless other additions to the pile of drifting potential, the more difficult it will be to get through when we finally do take on the task of tackling the inbox. So we have put together a post that will hopefully shed some much needed light on this situation in order to assist you in keeping your inbox managed and clear. This way, you have one more area handled to help steer you on as productive a path as possible.

E-mail is a critical tool in and of itself in keeping you in touch and up to date with your co-workers, clients, business partners, etc. So it is vital that we learn to manage our e-mail effectively, so as to not let our business potential waste away in an unread, or worse unresponded to, message. So we will turn for assistance to other tools and tips that you can use to make the most of this communication outlet.

Consider some of our previous articles:

• The Art And Science Of The Email Signature is a post from the Smashing vaults that covers putting together the perfect e-mail signature.
• Best Practices For Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery more help from our archives on getting your e-mail where you need it to go.

Tools to Keep Handy

Now like with any task, there are several tools that you have at your disposal that can assist you in reaching a much more productive place when it comes to your daily business communications. Getting your virtual toolbox packed and ready to go is always the first step in most processes. Dealing with your e-mail is certainly no different. There are various mail clients, apps and plugins to make your mail delivery and management a breeze, if you know where to look to get them all in order. For now, you will only need to look below for a few toolbox favorites from around the community, which most of you are probably already familiar with. But we always want to start at the beginning just in case.

We have broken the tools down into client specific categories for several of the most popular e-mail clients around. Each category has a hand full of helpful client expanding addons and links that will allow for complete customization and maximizing of whichever program you opt for. If your particular mail client is not listed, we apologize.
Please feel free to leave info about it in the comments section below, complete with what you like about it to help us expand on the post!

Outlook

Image credit: Lars Plougman

Xobni saves time searching and managing your email. It automatically creates profiles with all the emails and files you’ve exchanged. Everything you need is a search away.

Outlook Templates You simple have to write and format your text once and then you can insert it in mail messages of any type (HTML, RTF, plain text) repeatedly. QTE keeps all the text parameters and formatting unchanged, which allows you to create lots of various headings, signatures, phrases, or any other text blocks, lines, or words you use frequently in your correspondence.

Organizer shifts your attention from a message centric paradigm to one focused on work. Organizer helps you get organized by defining Projects and Focuses and saving them into the Categories field.

GTD Addon Now you can put David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, used by over half a million people to keep themselves organized; to work for you in Microsoft Outlook and manage your Inbox as well as getting things done on time.

Thunderbird

Image credit: nano taboada

Lightning Allows managing calendars locally or subscribing to network calendars.

ReminderFox displays and manages lists of reminders and ToDo’s. ReminderFox makes sure you remember all of your important dates via easy-to-use lists, alerts, and alarms, right in your browser without the need for a separate calendar program.

Send Later extends the Send Later functionality by bringing up a scheduler for the time when the ‘Send Later’ option is chosen (Ctrl+Shift+Enter is the shortcut). The extension saves the message to draft and monitors the messages in the draft folder, when the chosen time arrives it moves the message to unsent and sends unsent messages.

Quicktext lets you create templates that can be easily inserted into your own emails. Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails.

Gmail

Image credit: notoriousxl

Active Inbox an email tool to manage email in Gmail and Google Apps. Formerly known as GTDInbox and GTDGmail, it has been managing email overload since 2006, regularly serves 15,000 professionals, and has been prominently reviewed at Mozilla and across the Web.

Keyboard Shortcuts is a one page printable cheat sheet.

Gmail Notifier The original notifier for Gmail. Supports checking multiple accounts as well as Gmail Hosted accounts.

How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center

Apple Mail

MailHub a new plug-in for Apple Mail which revolutionises email management. File, create new mailboxes, delete or assign actions to your email effortlessly without interruption to your workflow.

Attachment Scanner When you send a message, it checks whether there’s an attachment. If there isn’t, and it looks like you’ve referred to an attachment in the body of your mail (by using a word like attach, attaching, attachment, etc), it gives you a warning.

Letterbox rearranges your Mail.app interface into a three vertical column setup intended to take advantage of your widescreen monitor.

Related Mail shows messages related to the currently viewed message.

Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes

Image credit: mikes rite

All Around Tools

Here are a couple more tools that you can use no matter what mail client you are using.

Zendesk is a great addon for anyone who needs to maintain a virtual help desk for your business, or who gets a lot of site generated mail.

Mailchimp is an online based service that handles e-mail marketing for your business and allows you to setup mailing lists.

Keep Time on Your Side

Once you have all of the proper tools in place to help get you started, another critical element to managing your e-mail, is managing the time that you devote to this important task. Too much time and your productivity begins to slip away from your grasp once again. Too little time, and not only does your productivity dip, but you also risk the overall performance of your business dropping too, as important e-mails requiring action fall through the cracks. This is usually the motivator that keeps people going back and forth to their inbox all day long. Breaking their workflow, and keeping them in a constant state of digression. It is important to note that even though it may feel like this is keeping you one step ahead of the game, it is more than likely keeping you one step behind.

Creativity is often talked about for having a flow to it, and if you are designing or developing, breaking in and out of that mindset to go and check your mail, even possibly reply to one or two, is not a good way to maintain said flow. Your clients and projects deserve your full attention, and most clients will understand you taking time to get back to them, figuring that you are hard at work on their task anyway. So don’t break your flow, instead set yourself a schedule for checking e-mail. Give yourself two or three times during the work day to go in and see if there is anything that needs your immediate attention. And if it is absolutely necessary because you are expecting a particular e-mail that you know you will need to get to right away, use a notification service for a heads up. This way at a glance you can tell if you need to take a break or not.

Quick Tips to Save Time

• Set a schedule and stick to it.
• Use a notification service if it is absolutely necessary.
• In your replies, stay on topic and be as brief as possible.
• Reply in a timely fashion, waiting allows for pile up.
• Have a comprehensive and helpful signature to shave off some time.

Image credit: Letheravensoar

Keep Organized

One major time saver as well as e-mail management must is keeping your inbox and messages sorted and well organized. This will definitely make wading through your inbox less chaotic and allow you to effectively establish a hierarchy of importance to all of your incoming messages. The easiest way to do this is through the use of folders or tags within whichever mail client you decide to go with. Adding this level of structure to your inbox will give you a key to navigating through it without the unnecessary proverbial roadblocks popping up in your way to slow you down. Especially if you have relegated your e-mail checking to a schedule, then getting in and getting right to the important messages is a high priority to make the most of the time devoted to this essential task.

If you are going to use the folder/tagging method then a couple that you might want to consider, just to get you started, would be a ‘To-Do’, a ‘Waiting On’, and a ‘Working On’ folder or tag. This way at a glance you could decide where you need to focus. On those things that are pressing and you need to get tackled, or following up on a client who you have been waiting to hear back from. Or if you have a project that you are in the middle of, you might need to correspond with someone about it so that is where you might need to focus you efforts for the time being. However you go about it, some method of sorting out your incoming mail will definitely keep things on a more productive track.

Quick Tips to Stay Organized

• Use folders or tags to keep things prioritized.
• No, really use them. Don’t just set them up and then never sort your mail.
• If it won’t take long, go ahead and reply rather than store it.
• Be fluid in your filing. Know that you might have to adjust as you go.
• Once you have folders/tags in place, try to keep your main inbox empty.

Keep Canned Replies

Your incoming mail is not the only area that you can add a little organization to help you stay the course and not get sucked in to losing hours in replying to the messages you have sorted. If you really think about it and examine the e-mails that you are sending out, you can probably distill a large portion of them into categories of responses. If that is the case, you might also find that in a lot of those messages you are saying about the same thing time and again to different people. It happens quite often in business, your conversations with clients and co-workers can often tend to follow somewhat of a pattern. You can make this work in your favor quite easily by setting up some canned responses.

Think of them as communicational templates for responding to messages without having to take the time to type out the same message over and over. By using these templates you simply have to plug in some minor details to the framework you already have established, and you can clear your inbox with relative ease and quickness. Any corner you can cut to help move the e-mail process along is going to keep you from dreading the task and from procrastinating. So keeping these canned responses handy can serve to take a certain amount of the edge off, without compromising that personal attention and touch that your communication requires.

Quick Tips to Using Templates

• Find the areas where you end up saying the same things over and over.
• Do not think of it as a form letter, write as you normally would.
• Always proofread the template when it is filled in to be sure it correctly flows.
• The more general the template the more areas it can cover with slight alterations.

Keep it Professional

When it comes to managing your e-mail, no matter which of the previous bits of advice you choose to follow, if any, one thing to remember is that above all else, be sure that you always keep things professional. Brevity will keep you ahead of the curve and moving along at a smooth pace, but professionalism will actually keep you in business. This is one place that you should never really compromise your standards, otherwise you risk losing that professional edge that your clients and co-workers appreciate alike. A lot is read into your communications beyond just what is written, so you want to be sure that you are being clear and coherent throughout the messages to clients and co-workers.

The tone of your messages is also very important for keeping a professional feel for all of your business back and forths, so you will want to take great care to ensure that the proper tone is being sent. Even if you are dealing with a particularly difficult client or an annoying co-worker, you need to remember that loosing your cool is only going to make things that much worse. So always keep that in mind and take the high road as much as possible when you are communicating from and for your business. If you find that you cannot maintain the correct tone because the message or situation you are replying to has gotten to you too much, then store it and come back to it again when you are more confident in your composure.

Image credit: Jack Bet

Quick Tips to Communicate Professionally

• Keep it clear and readable.
• Always keep the subject line relevant.
• If you cannot be professional in tone, come back later.
• Add recipients last so you do not accidentally send an incomplete message.

Further Resources

Below are just a few more resources on this topic that we have gathered for your convenience. It is up to you if you want the ride to stop here, but if you want the discussion to keep going, check out these posts and the comments section for more.

10 Email Organization Tips is a helpful post from NetManners that will help you keep your e-mail organized.

Five Easy Steps To E-Mail Organization is an article from the Huffington Post that talks about some simple steps to getting your e-mail in order.

Making Your Email Match Your Business Style is an insightful post from Build Internet on syncing your e-mail with the style and tone of your company.

As you may have noticed, from time-to-time we like to highlight to our readers some of the best freely available and freshest possible icon-sets. We really do love them, and we are sure you will love the selection we have for you today. You will find a mixed bag of social icons, an almost complete e-commerce set, and, finally, a flag icon-set that consists of a monumentally huge 2400 icons.

Discons

The Discons icon set, designed by Dave McNally, consists of 95 icons and all are 24px circles. Each icon has one unified shape – the glyph was combined with the background and knocked out of the shape. This means it’s easier for you to alter colours as there’s only one shape for each icon.
Discons

Glossy E-Commerce Icon Set

Ecommerce Glossy has been created by the folks at Iconshock for Hongkiat readers. It consists of 21 different e-commerce related icons in total and comes in these formats: AI, PSD and PNG.
Glossy E-Commerce Icon Set

2400 Flag Icon Set

Liquidcity has created a flag icon for every major country in the world, plus a few more. They've created them in several sizes so they'll look great no matter where you use them – 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48, and 64×64. They also come in 2 variants – as flat and standard, and the other with a lovely glossy finish.
2400 Flag Icon Set

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).