Christmas season is a widespread phenomenon in Western and Western-influenced countries. It officially starts in late November and ends in early January. It is the biggest shopping season that,…
The post The Essential Guide to Christmas Web Design appeared first on Onextrapixel.
Whatever season it is, we are all waiting for Christmas. It is the most wonderful time of the year that leaves everything bad behind and promises new starts. It…
The post Top 10 Free Christmas Icon Sets to Prepare for the Holidays appeared first on Onextrapixel.
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Christmas is just around the corner, and what better way to celebrate than with some free goodies? We sifted through the web (and our archives) to find holiday-themed icon sets for you that’ll give your creative projects some holiday flair. Perfect for Christmas cards, gift tags, last-minute wrapping paper, or whatever else you can think of.
All icons can be downloaded for free, but please consult their licenses or contact the creators before using them in commercial projects. Reselling a bundle is never cool, though. Have a happy holiday season!
The post Christmas Goodies: Free Winter- And Holiday-Inspired Icon Sets (EPS, AI, PNG) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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Are you ready for the countdown to Christmas? Today, we’re merrily releasing a brand new Christmas Advent Icon Set, a set of 25 icons that are all available in AI, EPS, SVG, PNG and PDF formats. These icons were all designed and created by Manuela Langella and are free to be used in private as well as commercial projects.
You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. Please note that this icon set is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word about the freebie.
The post Freebie: Christmas Advent Icon Set (25 Icons, AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, PDF) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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New month, new wallpapers! To get you in the right mood for December, designers and artists from across the globe got their ideas bubbling and created unique and inspiring Christmas wallpaper calendars to deck your desktop. This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now, and we are very thankful to everyone who challenges their artistic skills and contributes to it each month anew.
This post features desktop artwork for December 2016. Each wallpaper comes in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Now you only need to decide on your favorite!
The post Christmas Wallpaper Calendars: December 2016 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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It’s Christmas time, and we’re happy to release a brand-new freebie today, just for you! A set of 110 Christmas icons and illustrations that you can you use for sending your Christmas greetings and for any commercial projects.
The set has been designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko, from Minsk, Belarus, and released for free for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all these elements and others for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything.
The post Freebie: Christmas Icons Set (110 Icons, AI, PSD, EPS) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Christmas is one of the most important festivals in the Christian calendar, and other religions have celebrations around this time too. No matter what your religion or belief, whether you are celebrating or simply having another weekend, there are some wonderful sites around the internet that can bring a smile to your face… either because they are interactive and engrossing, or because they are examples of good design.
If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs this weekend, you might like to waste some time on these great, festive sites.
This is the second or third year that Google have produced this interactive site that is, in fact, an advent calendar. Each day from 1st December until 25th December a new activity opens up, which will be a game, a video or an educational activity. A great way to waste some time this festive season!
This festive game, brought to you by the supermarket chain Spar, is strangely addictive. You have to build bridges across the chimneys for your character to walk across and deliver gifts down the chimneys. If you build the bridge too short or too long your character will fall. The aim is to collect as many Spar logos as possible. It takes a little practice to get to grips with how long the bridges should be, and the only advice to be given here is make them longer rather than shorter… but oh yes – not too long, of course!
This is another advent calendar. Behind each number is an illustration created using one of four shapes: square, triangle, circle or hexagon. All illustrations are available as wallpaper for download on iPhone and iPad. The site asks for donations which will go to #missionchristmas.
Neve is Italian for ‘snow’, and this project, devised by Active Theory, has a small, interactive island on the screen with a log cabin and a couple of pine trees. A snow cloud hovers above it, and as you move your mouse cursor over the snow it moves. You can also rotate the cube to see it from all angles – a quite pointless but engrossing waste of time!
This famous chocolate manufacturer has produced this site that lets you send a Christmas card to someone. The interactive journey through the process is very entertaining.
This project explores the best selling Christmas toys each year for the last 35 years. In 1984 Transformers were top of the tree, in 1991 it was the Sega Game Gear and 2013 was Furby’s year. Check out this site to see if your favorite toy made the list.
This is another project that lets you send wishes to friends and family. Here, however, you are given a page link to send to the recipient, or you can share it on Facebook to their timeline or your own if it is a general greeting. You can choose one of 7 characters related to Christmas around mainly Europe: Christkind (Germany), Pere Noel (France), La Befana (Italy), Ded Moroz (Russia)Jolasveinarnn (Iceland), Krampus (Austria) Gwiazdor (Poland). Then you get to write your greeting. When the recipient views the card, they see your greeting and it is signed from you and the character you chose.
This is the brainchild of Blender, and interactive digital agency. They claim it is a ‘survival guide’, and the site contains a series of articles/tips for certain, difficult aspects of the holiday period, such as ‘Surviving the World’s Worst Gift’, ‘Getting in Those Holiday Zzzz’s’ and ‘The Successful Secret Santa’.
This is a case of ‘what you see is what you get’… this is it, snow gently falling across the screen that shows you the countdown to Christmas.
Similar to the previous example, this is a Christmas countdown. However, this one gives you the option to personalize the page with your name. It also gives you the amount of sleeps before Christmas and the number of days (how many Mondays, Tuesdays, etc) before the big day. This is also available as an iPhone app.
Yet another Christmas countdown project, however, this site will also tell you (should you wish to know) how many days until New Year, Easter, Halloween, Spring, etc. There is also an events page and calendar page. Be warned… the events are based around English football fixtures!
This site is dedicated to children and parents, with plenty of activities based on the festive season, including games and handcrafts.
We are going to let this site describe what they do themselves via their about section:
Christmas is for Sharing… and Christmas.com, the Official Site of Christmas, helps families and friends share Christmas wish lists, traditions, recipes, gift ideas, music, and more. This year give the perfect gift, get what you really want, and share your Christmas spirit with the Christmas.com community around the world.
Not quite sure how they can declare themselves to be ‘the Official Site of Christmas’, but in true festive spirit we will overlook this at this time of year!
This project offers a Gift Guide, Party Planner, Recipes and Holiday Tips. The main aim of the site is to sell their coffee machine and products.
This site is included in this round up as it is a walk through a winter wonderland. The famous jewelry company has excelled with this site design and it is a joy to scroll through their landing page slide show.
The aim of this site was to raise money for Musicians on Call – for every 4 minutes that someone listened to the playlist of Christmas songs, IMRE would donate to the charity. They reached 100% of their $ 10k donation ceiling, but the playlist is still available to listen to – a great way to get yourself in the festive mood!
This is an online multiplayer game… but you have to wait for others to join and that could take a while!
Hopefully you are now feeling ‘in the mood’ for a great celebration or a chilled weekend.
All of us at Onextrapixel would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a very Merry Christmas, or if you don’t celebrate it, a great weekend… but for everyone we wish a healthy, happy and prosperous 2016.
Please share with us what you are up to this festive season… are you working through or are you celebrating with family and/or friends? Are you staying at home or are you going away for a real chilled out Christmas?
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It’s Christmas time, and we’re happy to release a brand-new freebie today, just for you! A set of 110 Christmas icons and illustrations that you can you use for sending your Christmas greetings and for any commercial projects.
The set has been designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko, from Minsk, Belarus, and released for free for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all these elements and others for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything.
The post Freebie: Christmas Icons Set (AI, PSD, EPS) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
The holidays are here, so let’s celebrate! PSD2HTML is rocking around the Christmas tree and rolling out a great Christmas giveaway. So put down the tinsel and step back from the mistletoe. It only takes a minute to enter. The rewards are enough to fill any web developer’s or web designer’s stocking. Just check it out!
Santa’s sleigh will deliver a load of prizes to three lucky winners. Plus, every entry wins 20% off at Creative Market and a free 2-month subscription to any monthly plan at Proposify (if you’re a new Proposify customer).
*Can be used any time in 2016 to cover up to 60% of the value of any order.
That’s over $ 2,700 in prizes – you can’t take a pass on that! Hurry up! This contest only runs from December 17 through December 22, and the winners will be announced on December 23. Entering is just a click away using the entry form below. To double your chances, tweet about the contest.
Good luck everyone!
We are about to finish up with another great year and Christmas is around the corner. It’s the time of the year, when everybody is getting ready for Christmas, expecting to see a fair of cheer everywhere. If you want to add some Christmas spirit to your WordPress website as well, and greet your visitors with a fun atmosphere, then follow the list of the WP plugins below. They will help you to prepare your website for the Christmas and make it look festive and fun.
Christmas decorations and animations never seem to be enough. Decorating your website for Christmas can be as fun as decorating your workplace or your house. WordPress Christmas Animation plugin is a bundle of various Christmas related animations, cards and images.
The plugin also adds beautiful falling snow to your website. There are 30 Christmas images within the plugin, with slide in and slide out effects. You can add multiple animations to any of your website’s post or page of your choice. You can also edit Christmas image size and set the speed of the image rotation when it appears on the page. The plugin works perfectly on all themes and provides a lot of customization options for all its features.
On Christmas people are looking for events and activities to get in the festive mood. If you also want to make your website visitors happy and plan to organize some holiday events for them, make sure they’re not missing them out. Event Calendar WD plugin will help you to spread awareness about Christmas events you organize. You can display calendars as widgets on your website sidebar or place the calendar shortcode on any of your website’s post or page. You’ll be able to create unlimited number of events and have either single or multiple events per day. The plugin has seven attractive views and comes with six build in themes. You also have the possibility to add new themes and give them your preferred custom styling.
Among the view modes Map views and Posterbord are my favorites, as they are really unique. You can have multiple organizers for a single event and show the event location on Google Maps. The Calendar supports structured event microdata, which helps search engines to easily understand and find the events on your website. You can attach tags and categories to all of your events. The plugin features a filter which enables you to display events by venues, organizers, categories. There is a possibility to show related events to the website visitors. You can also allow your website visitors to leave comments under your calendar events. If there are events that you are going to hold repeatedly, the Event Calendar WD plugin will handle them with ease. Just specify the event repeating rate and they will automatically appear on the calendar.
You can provide custom URL and also YouTube or Vimeo video URLs for displaying event details.
With Countdown add-on of the plugin you can add a countdown widget to Christmas, which would be a great addition to your calendar.
When we think about Christmas we also automatically think about Santa Claus. Bringing a Santa to your website will be great idea. Especially if the Santa is animated and can move all around your website. Merry Christmas Everyone plugin will turn your website into a fun and cheerful place.
There are two Santas to choose from, which are flying and sliding as your website visitors move the cursor over the page. The Santa follows the cursor and then lands on a random place on the page. You can add a URL of a website that you want your visitors to redirect to when they click on Santa. The plugin supports HTML5 Song OGG which will enable you to add sounds or background musing on your website. You can also add MP3 song URLs. The Santa with a blue bag on his back is super cute!
What make us feel that the Christmas is in the air is the presence of various photos and videos with Santa Claus, Christmas trees, gifts, decorations, cakes and cookies all around. Adding Christmas related images on your website will certainly give it a festive look. As the most popular image sharing platform, Instagram is full of such images at the end of the year. Don’t miss the opportunity to easily add different Instagram feeds on your website by using Instagram Feed WD plugin. This Instagram plugin is an advanced tool for showing multiple public Instagram feeds and hashtags, either by displaying them as widgets or by inserting them in your posts or pages using the feed shortcode.
There are three options for displaying feeds: Infinite scrolling, load more option and pagination. If you choose to display different feeds in your posts or pages, there are 4 great layout options to choose from: Blog style, Masonry, Thumbnail and Image browser. I want to point out Blog style and Masonry views, which stand out providing elegant and unique look to your blog.
Almost every setting of feeds is customizable. You have the possibility to choose either to redirect your website visitors to the image Instagram account or open it in the lightbox when they click on the image thumbnail. The advanced lightbox of the plugin enables you to display the accompanying image details, such as captions, likes, comments, and hashtags. You can also enable “Follow” button for your visitors to start following the accounts they liked. There is a possibility to display images in the lightbox with filmstrip effect. The lightbox can serve as a slider as well, with around 15 slide transition effects. The videos in the feeds will be played in the lightbox as HTML5 videos.
The plugin themes can also be fully customized to suit your website tone and spirit. You can adjust almost every feature of the themes and also add new themes with the custom header, user data, pagination and layout options.
The plugin is easy to use and SEO-friendly, which will help you to optimize your website post and pages with necessary SEO requirements.
Don’t forget to greet your website visitors with warm Christmas wishes written on colorful cards. Christmas Card plugin is there to make it happen easily and without sharing much time. There are nine beautiful cards within the plugin, that will go with almost any kind of website. The cards are shown only once to each visitor before they get to the actual website.
You can modify the cards, change their colors and, of course, edit the text on the cards to fit your targeted visitors. There are also 5 great Christmas songs available, to play as a background music, such as “Jingle Bells”, “Joy to the World”, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. The plugin also allows you to add falling 3D snow with different variations to your website. It’s SEO- friendly and just super easy to set up. Chubby and cheerful Santa on The Happy Santa card is my fav.
Christmas is a cheerful time for everyone. With these plugins you will be able to give your website a Christmas spirit and, of course, wish your website visitors a Merry and joyful Christmas.
All the plugins work perfectly and have been personally tested. In case you have any questions regarding any of them, feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll be glad to help you.
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