 |
We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.
This creativity mission has been going on for over four years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for June 2012. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!
Please note that:
- All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
- You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
Without Angry
"This bird is cool not angry :-)." Designed by Tinjo Thomas from India.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
Hello Summer
"Flying people are saying hello to summer." Designed by Paul Capcan from Moldova.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Chromatic Baba
"Baba(sadhu) is the Hindu ascetic who has renounced caste, social position, money, and authority and occupies a special place in Hindu society.He absorbed all colors from a spiritual life, devoid of material pleasure, mostly engaged in visiting holy places." Designed by Yoshita Singhai from India.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Fontstache
"This piece pays homage to Mr. Roger Hargreaves, creative kids author to such imaginative stories as Mr. Messy and my personal favourite: Mr. Bounce.We utilized the ‘Curly Brackets’ and titled each according to the font type that was used. Appropriate for the month of June as we celebrate Father’s Day this month." Designed by Pop Up Factory from Milton, Ontario, Canada.
- preview
- with calendar: 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
- without calendar: 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
Go Nuts For Donuts
Designed by Bonnie Bladen from USA.
- preview
- with calendar: 1366×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1366×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
Brjs – Playing Cards
Designed by Gisela Eblagon from Argentina.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
Sunset In Jamaica
"Photo from a recent trip to Jamaica edited to give a retro look and feel." Designed by Tommy Digiovanni from USA.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
Beach
Designed by Lotum from Germany.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
Dreams
"This is the summer of dreams. Go get them!" Designed by Nandor Tamas from USA.
- preview
- with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
- without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
Friendly Fire
Designed by Roland Szabo from Hungary.
- preview
- with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
June Romance
"Mark and Jenny Linn are, perhaps, the dreamiest and the most romantic couple in the whole world. Their love story began in a vintage San Francisco bookstore 5 years ago and continues till the present day. In June Mark and Jenny usually arrange aspecial dinner to watch the night sky and make a common wish for the future, while watching the falling star." Designed by Maria S. from USA.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Magic Night
Designed by Mateusz Mackowiak from Poland.
- preview
- with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Africa
Designed by Cheloveche.ru from Russia.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 395×512, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
Fruit Ninja Did This
Designed by Ioana Bitin (aka Yoot) from Romania.
- preview
- with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Basketball Nagraj
"Nagraj is an comic superhero in India. In this wallpaper you can see Nagraj as a basketball. I made this a little fun because in India June is a Holiday season for children." Designed by Sandeep Virk from India.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Retro Smile
"This is the retro photography of my aunt from 1964 photographed in the beautiful village near the city Nis in Serbia." Designed by Marija Zaric from Serbia.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
Vidovdan – Folk Festival
Designed by Tihomir Budic from BiH/Republika Srpska.
- preview
- with calendar: 480×800, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 480×800, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
I Need Holidays
"After a busy year, we need a long vacation!" Designed by Gopango Networks from Spain.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
Out Of The Box
"Release your creativity!" Designed by Ajan Navaratnasingam from London, UK.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Fete De La Musique
"La Fete de la Musique, also known as World Music Day, is a music festival taking place on June 21, read more on wikipedia." Designed by Sherif Saleh from France.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 640×960, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1360×768, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1440×1050, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200
June Pastures
Designed by Nishant Sapra from India.
- preview
- with calendar: 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
- without calendar: 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
Illustration
"Vector hand drawing illustration of beautiful woman’s face with flowers in her hair and floral pattern behind her." Designed by Jane Lane from Russia.
- preview
- with calendar: 800×1210, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1176×735, 1280×800, 1280×1024
Euro 2012
Designed by Katerina Bobkova from Ukraine.
- preview
- with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
- without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
Paris Summer
Designed by Martina Pitбkovб from Slovakia.
- preview
- with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2036×1440
- without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2036×1440
Join In Next Month!
Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.
A big thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month!
What’s Your Favourite?
What’s your favorite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comment section below.
Stay creative and keep on smashing!
(il) (vf)
© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.
Aarron Walter is the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, where he socializes with primates and ponders ways to make interfaces more human. Aarron is the author of Designing for Emotion, the purple stripe in the rainbow of knowledge from A Book Apart. He lives with his wife and son in Athens, Georgia, and is a wannabe barista. He tweets about design under the moniker 
Chris Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time to making the Web better. Originally from a radio journalism background, he built his first website from scratch in around 1997, and he spent the following years working on a lot of large international websites, and a few years at Yahoo building products and training people; he is now at Mozilla. Chris has written and contributed to four books on Web development and has written many articles and hundreds of blog posts for Ajaxian, Smashing Magazine, Yahoo, Mozilla, ScriptJunkie and many more.
Jeremy Keith makes websites. He is responsible for the death of the trees used to print the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax and, most recently, HTML5 for Web Designers. He also shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Originally from Ireland, Jeremy now lives in Brighton, England where he pretends to work with Clearleft. Peas grow there.
Jonathan Snook writes about tips, tricks and bookmarks on 
Josh spends his time thinking about, designing and building things that live at the intersection of form, function and aesthetic. He is principal designer at Twitter and is the co-creator of 52 Weeks of UX, Ffffallback and Shares. He is also an advisor and mentor at The Designer Fund.
Lea has a long-standing passion for open Web standards and has been often called a CSS guru. She loves researching new ways to take advantage of modern Web technologies, and she shares her findings on 
Paul Boag has been working on the Web since 1993. He is Web Strategist at Headscape Ltd, a Web design agency that he cofounded back in 2002. Paul also produces and hosts the longest-running and award-winning Web design podcast at 
Rachel Andrew is a front- and back-end Web developer, author and speaker. Her books include the bestselling CSS Anthology for SitePoint, and she is a regular contributor to a number of publications both online and off, including Smashing Magazine. She writes about business and technology on 
Gallery of the speakers at the Smashing Conference.
Responsive design has made designing flexible websites fashionable again, but there is more to being fashionably flexible than technology or using CSS3 media queries. So, this unique workshop — hosted by 
“Years ago I started collecting links, and once a week I would write an email to my colleagues with a small introduction to every link. Later on I decided that more people than just my colleagues might benefit from this collection, so I decided to publish everything on 
Elliot Jay Stocks introduces the new Smashing Book #3 by making us think about our workflow, the quality of our work, our industry and our community. Working in an industry that evolves at an incredible speed takes a lot of effort—at the same time, it’s what keeps us going.
A redesign is the best thing that a Web designer can experience. Yet before leaping head on into a project, we must consider the business behind the redesign. By its nature, a redesign has the potential to make a website successful, but it also has the power to destroy a perfectly good idea. Important considerations to keep in mind before engaging in a redesign project include common dangers, required research, the working process with the client and testing. Paul Boag leads you through this process step by step.
Once you have understood the business side of the redesign project, the next step is to choose the right platform. Understanding all of the requirements of a project will save you valuable time in aligning the new functionality with the technological circumstances. Take stock of existing structures such as the CMS, e-commerce system and payment gateway. Beware of the project constraints, including the budget and wishes of the client. Only then will you be able to concentrate fully on the project, without encountering unpleasant surprises ahead.
Ben Schwarz takes away the fear that many Web developers suffer when confronted with a new technology—by encouraging experimentation. The chapter guides you through the new HTML5 elements and discusses the possibilities that come with the adaptation to these elements. This is a practical, compact guide to HTML5, with everything you need to know today in order to create flexible and maintainable websites for the future.
Some CSS workarounds that have hung around from earlier days prevent us from becoming better, more efficient designers. Learn how to recode CSS to reduce the number of images, HTTP requests, presentational JavaScript and wrapper divs on the page, while making the style more flexible and maintainable. Learn about the rem unit, Flexible Box Layout, source-order independence with flex order, multiple backgrounds and gradients, background clipping, border images, transforms, transitions, box sizing and new CSS3 selectors. Restyle, recode, reimagine: because CSS3 is here to stay!
Even though jQuery is written in JavaScript, it is not the same; nor is it native to browsers. The large jQuery library abstracts away a lot of issues that Web developers face, yet sometimes it’s used without a real purpose. Christian Heilmann takes us back to its origins and shows us how to implement simple JavaScript solutions without resorting to jQuery, achieving the same result in a slimmer and less process-intensive way.
User experience means good design, and the central aim of design is not to decorate, but to solve problems. Whether that means getting more sign-ups, inviting users to post more content or making the interface easier and faster to use, this is ultimately the sort of design that delivers a great user experience. This chapter features powerful UX techniques that you can easily apply to your products and websites. Make sure users stay on your website for the right reasons, and get an edge over the competition by improving user-targeted processes. Also, explore experimental approaches and avoid some misleading design techniques.
Because good design and user experience are almost mandatory for success today, the lines between desktop software, mobile software and the Web are increasingly blurry. We have to continually change our tools and techniques to meet new requirements. Marc Edwards addresses some of the challenges that Web designers face today and will in the future when using Photoshop. Realism, scale, screen sizes, resolutions, formats, techniques—this chapter touches on all of it. There is no reason to surrender to scaleability and liquid image requirements when using Photoshop!
Any design that does not effectively establish a connection with its audience has missed its goal. Getting to know your user is just as important as knowing yourself and the personality behind the brand; this will set you apart from competitors. This chapter describes how to develop your own design persona and define the key characteristics to guide your project’s path. New technologies and techniques are not what build connections with users, but rather the empathy evoked by the personality behind them. Aaron Walter explains how to bring out the personality at the heart of your work.
The native vs. Web debate is meaningless and counterproductive. All products nowadays have high demands for UX design. Web designers turn into UX designers by gaining specialized knowledge of the Web and by mastering auxiliary frameworks and their components. Not only do the aesthetics of an interaction object count, but also how the object behaves upon contact. Designing documents and designing applications requires knowledge of basic responsive design principles and progressive enhancement. This chapter helps you understand your medium, explains what exactly it means for an application to be “native,� and goes over how to choose the right tools and technologies for the job.
Web design changes quickly. In multiplatform design, where websites and apps are used on many and varied devices, we are confronted with multiple destinations. How do you go about integrating as many devices as possible? Is targeting as many different platforms as possible really important? In this chapter, Stephen Hay suggest a new design workflow for responsive Web design. A new way of thinking leads to a new way of design—the sooner you get the hang of it, the sooner you will be ready to discover what works best for your projects.
There are significant upsides to responsive Web design for designers, especially in workflows that embrace flexibility. Responsive Web design still asks more questions than it answers, and it challenges the working relationships and interactions between everyone involved in every process. Andy Clarke gives you some insight into the techniques that helped him become fabulously flexible when developing responsive designs. Learn his approach to designing atoms and elements of a design first and see if it works for you. It might enable you to create many facets of the same experience within a single workflow.
The Smashing Book #3 was limited to a certain size and format, making it impossible to include all of the chapters without compromising the book’s overall integrity. The Smashing Book #3⅓ is a challenge: explore the possibilities that modern technology and our design legacy have in store for us Web designers.
Today’s Web audience is on the search for more than just information. Consumers expect to be engaged and want to be drawn in by a website, one that makes them feel something and manages to inspire. While changing the look and feel of a website used to be somewhat easy, it is time to reconsider the fundamentals of our approach to a redesign. Learn how to successfully capture attention by using copywriting and storytelling, and understand the important relationship between emotion, design and story.
Navigation is what lends a page interactivity, connecting otherwise isolated pages into a logical order. Still, its design must fit the content and purpose of the website, not the other way around. Organic content calls for new and adaptive navigational elements. But how do we go about that? This chapter gives you useful insight into rethinking your approach to navigation.
If you invest much time and effort in the design of your website, but not the content, you’re taking a big risk. Don’t disappoint your users with the same old content after raising expectations with an impressive design. This chapter takes a strategic approach to content and explains the basics of formulating the right content strategy for your website redesign.
Redesigns usually introduce unexpected changes and are rarely applauded; moreover, a large-scale redesign is a tough and risky game to play. Smashing Magazine faced a long list of technical and UX changes in July 2011, and the team decided to act. This chapter presents a detailed case study of the whole redesign process, from A to Z, as it happened, and it sheds some light on the design, UX and technical considerations that actually led to the redesign.
