SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

The ocean is an incredibly relaxing place to be. At nearly every beach and oceanfront property you are able to hear the seagulls and foghorns going off at all hours. It’s an amazing lifestyle which incorporates a lot of beauty and creativity. And if you can’t find yourself at the ocean very often, photography is always an alternative option.

Below I have compiled a fantastic gallery of 34 pristine ocean view photographs. These come from all over the world and feature a wide variety of landscapes. I highly recommend saving any of your favorites to use for later project work. Alternatively if you know of some great photographers or seascape photo galleries feel free to share your links in the comments below.

Ocean View Sunrise

Album covers are a great source of fresh inspiration for your graphic design work. Not only are well-designed album covers artistic, but they’re effective at marketing as well.

The best designed album covers:

1. Give you a clear representation of what the content will be
2. Sell you on the content by looking great itself

In other words, what a great visual design should be.

Think about it: how many times were you intrigued by fantastic artwork, and when you put the music on, it was how you’d imagine it would be like? That was a well-designed album cover at work.

So next time you need a fresh source of inspiration for your design work, take a look at well-designed album covers. And the following list of the 20 best designed album covers will get you started.

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.

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.

With all the content-heavy and CMS-powered websites out there these days, I find it refreshing to browse a single-page website where all the content is accessible without loading or refreshing a page.

The sites in this post make great use of things like sliders, carousels, Ajax and auto-scroll scripts to display content in a way that doesn’t hinder the user experience but rather improves it. I hope you enjoy this showcase, and of course feel free to chime in and leave a comment at the end of the post.

If you’re been reading SpyreStudios for a while now you probably already know we like minimalist designs. In fact we’ve showcased many websites featuring a minimalist design in the past. We thought it was time for another round.

Minimalism doesn’t rhyme with grid systems, but many grid-based websites will feature a stripped down and clean design and make great use of typography. After all, it’s all about letting the content shine. I hope you enjoy this post!