SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

Minimalist design is one of the most significant design movements of the 20th century and early 21st century. It isn’t the flashiest, or the most popular, but it arguably penetrated more fields than almost any other art or design trend. Everything from user interfaces, to hardware designs, to cars, to films and games, to the web and visual designs of today – all those fields and more were influenced by minimalism.

Your friends might not know what minimalism is, but chances are they’re currently using or viewing a minimalist design: a modern phone, a clean web or application interface, looking at a slick brochure or other graphically-presented information, sitting in a simple living space on a sleek sofa, and so forth.

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Icons come in all shapes and sizes. While the clean and minimalist style is better suited for applications and navigation menus, those highly detailed icons can sure add some eye-candy to your designs.

In fact, a lot of the icons in this post are so detailed that they could be used as feature rather than to complement say an interface or an application menu. I hope you enjoy the showcase. Feel free to chime in and leave a comment at the end of this post.

Web development keeps getting better – there are more increasingly-standardized tools like HTML5 and CSS3, and their features let web designers and developers create advanced and good-looking websites more easily.

But some browsers – mainly Internet Explorer version 6, 7, and 8 – don’t support many of these features, like border-radius, gradients, text-shadow, transparency, CSS animations and transitions, and so forth…

A while ago we shared 25 great web-design and development books and since this earlier post got a great response (and we’ve read a lot more books since), we’ve now gathered another 25.

In this list you’ll find books about design, theory, development, css, html and a lot more. I hope you enjoy the post!

There’s never been a better time to start or upgrade your blog. The tools available are fully-featured, polished solutions that make getting a professional and robust blog up and running ridiculously easy. Like, seriously – some of this stuff would’ve blown the minds of web developers in the ’90s.

But with so many options, which should you choose? This article will focus on the pros and cons of some of the most popular blog solutions: Self-hosted WordPress vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress.com.