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Watercolor effects are a pretty popular trend in web and graphic design right now. To come up with such effect, don’t think you really have to paint on an actual canvas and scan it. You can pretty much achieve the same effect using Photoshop brushes, plus, you can probably save more time doing so! In this freebie, we are giving away 7 High-Resolution Heavy Watercolor Spatter brushes to add to your design resources. Paint away!

These brushes are free to use for your personal and commercial projects but may not be sold or redistributed in any way.

Preview

Download

• heavy-watercolor-spatters-dawghouse (5.7MB, ZIP)

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• Fauna: Free High-Res Photoshop Floral Brushes
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• Related categories: Freebies and Graphic Design

About the Author

Jan Cavan is a web/graphic designer. She is also a blogger and the owner of Dawghouse Design Studio, her personal site. If you would like to connect with her, Follow her on Twitter and also join her on the Dawghouse Design Studio Facebook page.

Six Revisions

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 35 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked 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?

So what wallpapers have we received for January 2010?

New Year Inspiration

"Essential tools for the new year! Have a great year!" Designed by Phidev Inc. from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1920×1440
• without calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1920×1440

A Fresh Beginning

"One bleak morning, a girl sits on a dead tree. She feels sad but tried to put a smile on her lips. Suddenly three glittering butterflies went out from the branches and the world begins anew. The girl whispered, to the earth, ìthank you for a fresh beginning.î At that moment the sun begins to shine on the east." Designed by April Joy E. Jasmin from Philippines.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Paper flower

"Colorful design made in illustrator and retouched in photoshop." Designed by Guillermo Mantilla from Mexico.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050

New Beginnings

"A new year means, well….new? So that’s why I wanted to try something new. I have always loved the vector art I find all the internet and finally decided its about time to prove to myself that I can do that too. This piece is all about feeling, subconscious and conscious. I can’t believe how the slightest change in the curves or colors affected my sense of flow and for that reason I spent an unbelievable amount of time perfecting the flow of the piece ever so meticulously. Here’s to going from an old 2009 (red) to a fresh 2010 (blue)." Designed by Saidur Hossain from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

2010 in Style

"2010 Celebration with lots of friends. I hope you all have a wonderful 2010!" Designed by Sasha Bell from England, UK.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

It’s Snow

"January is a month of long nights, childhood stories, hot tea, cozy fireplaces and cookies with milk. I’d like to share this spirit in my image." Designed by Inna Ogando from Portugal.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Colorfull

"Happiness and colors." Designed by FranÁois Leproust aka MrRayures from France.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Towards Growth

"This is a hope for better year 2010." Designed by FahadQue from Pakistan.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

2010

Designed by Sven Johnson at Modern Postcard from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Multilingual Typographic Calendar

"The letters say “Happy New Year” in several languages. Moreover, I wanted to send out a message to all nations about the several universal problems which need to be addressed effectively in order to make this world a perfect place to live in." Designed by Abdus Salam from Pakistan.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1920×1200

Seeds

"Experimental piece meant to show growth and reason to flourish." Designed by Umer Tahir from Canada.

• preview
• with calendar: 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Friendly

"Lately I’ve been captivated by this very naive style of drawing; very cartoon-like. Although, it may be because that’s the limit of my drawing ability. But I’m proud of it, anyway! Inspired by cartoons and beautiful, bright colours." Designed by Eli Burford from Australia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Cool bulb’s

"We wish you a lot of cool ideas in 2010. 3D Modeling rendered with Cinema 4D." Designed by Hansjoerg Schneider from Switzerland.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1440×1080, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1440×1080, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

ScaryJanuary

Designed by Marta Miazek from Poland.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200

Ice Flowers

"I took some photos during a very frosty and cold week before Christmas.And with one of those decided to make a January wallpaper " Designed by Anca Varsandan from Romania.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Sacred Island

"Inspired by an avatar movie, floating island and dragon, happy new year everyone" Designed by Auliya Rahman from Indonesia.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×1024
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×1024

Wish You Were Here

"Picturing where I would rather be than in front of my computer." Designed by Valerie Morgan from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600

New Year Balloon Festival

"The traditional balloon festival brings in the new year!" Designed by Chris Alexander (Yipori) from England.

• preview
• with calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440
• without calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440

Party Animals

"The wallpaper is like watercolor paint effect of forest with animals along with January 2010 calendar. The wallpaper calendar depicts party animals wishing viewer on new year." Designed by Jayanthi from India.

• preview
• with calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900

Sexy new year

"I wish you a Sexy New Year!" Designed by Nick Voronin from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

New Year Party

"Wow, I’ve finally made it! It’s new year, and I want to celebrate it with my Illustration. So, happy new year guys!" Designed by Adrian Wildandyawan from Indonesia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Lifestyle Adjustment

"I designed this wallpaper for inspiration and encouragement for one of the best years of life ever." Designed by Millicent Bowman from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 480×320, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×768, 1280×800, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 480×320, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×768, 1280×800, 1400×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Inspire

Designed by Valentin Bozhilov.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Online Snowball Fight

"It’s wintertime here at thunder::tech, and we’re gearing up for a snowball fight! You’ve been in snowball fights before, but never like this—you can throw snowballs at your friends but you’ll never touch a flake of snow or go outside in the freezing cold! Enjoy this little piece of wonderland, complete with winter-themed animals and abominable snowmen!" Designed by tech from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Create/Destroy

Designed by Valerie Morgan from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600

Snowboard Season 2010

Designed by Davide Vicariotto from Italy.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Snow in January

"A snow that will not fall in my city gave me an inspiration for making this wallpaper" Designed by Klement Grgić from Croatia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×640, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900
• without calendar: 1024×640, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900

Dutch Winter

Designed by Pietje Precies from The Netherlands.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

A deer with a bird

"Illustrated desktop shows an idilic winter scene. A deer and a bird are telling us a story about frendship in unpleasent circumstances. It is a poetic message, that makes your desktop nicer and offers you an inspiration." Designed by Tina Krašovec from Slovenia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050

Extreme Winter

Designed by Julio Ortiz Gonzalez from Spain.

• preview
• with calendar: 800×480, 1024×640, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600
• without calendar: 800×480, 1024×640, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600

January Sentense

"Just motivating sentence for December " Designed by Temeshi from Poland.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Happy new year!

"New year wallpaper theme" Designed by Pisagor from Turkey.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Egg

"Just an egg to represent the new beginning this new year." Designed by Dsaurus from Philippines.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050

Join in next month!

Please notice that we respect the ideas and motivation behind artists’ work which is why we’ve given artists full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. And this is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

Thanks to all designers for participation. Join in next month!

What’s your favorite?

What’s your favourite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comments! And have a smashing January and New Year, folks!

---

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 48 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: Wallpapers

Smashing

As web developers, we spend precious time laying out our pages, using every UI concept in the book to conserve space, while trying to maintain a user’s focus on the task at hand. There are many techniques to use Lightbox, Carousel and Tabs to name a few – and recently Scott Robbin has offered up another: jQuery pageSlide.

jQuery pageSlide was inspired by the UI work of Aza Raskin. Aza introduced the idea of sliding content aside to reveal a secondary content pane. This plugin allows any developer to recreate a similar interaction on their own website using a few simple lines of Javascript.

By attaching the method to an anchor tag, pageSlide wraps the original body content into a wrapper and creates an additional block for the secondary content load. The slide is animated whenever the click event is invoked.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://srobbin.com/blog/jquery-pageslide/
License: GPL License

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Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

Webappers

Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting.

WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone era of examining and measuring what real users are really talking about on the social web. Now, let’s talk about Twilight and Michael Jackson. Or, in the choose-your-own-adventure model of blog posts, you can skip to the part where we talk about tech-related trending topics instead.

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One of the most notable uses of any social network to date was the role of Twitter in the Iranian election/debacle/bloodbath. The U.S. State Department even made a call when Twitter was scheduled for maintenance downtime during the pursuant protests because the messaging service had proven so vital to the democratic process in that country. The worldwide buzz – and the sudden surge of green-tinted user icons and locations changed to “Tehran” – make #iranelection the number one Twitter trend of 2009.

In an interesting convergence between mainstream Internet use and high-tech geekery that only Google could engineer, Wave appears in the number four spot for top Twitter trends. And we have a pretty good idea that Twitter users’ out-and-out begging for an invite provided the bulk of that talk. As our loyal readers know, the ReadWriteWeb team is divided on whether Wave is a win or a fail so far, but there’s no doubt that this tech launch was one of the hottest this year.

In a stunning and welcome upset, #musicmonday pulled ahead of #followfriday, besting the well-known but spam-heavy hashtag by four places (Monday landed in the second position, Friday in the sixth). Is Follow Friday, a charming concept created with the most harmless intentions by our dear friend Micah Baldwin, simply a trend that has seen its day? Or is there something about taste-making and multimedia content curation that draws users to simply participate more?

Also, there are the films. New Moon, the second in the Twilight franchise, earned a number five spot in the rankings. We are grateful that our sole experience of these tweets are a brilliant collection of snarks from professional lampooner, newly minted TV pretty boy and TheOnion.com web editor Baratunde Thurston. Also-rans are Paranormal Activity, a horror flick that turned a $15,000 budget into around $80 million in box office receipts, and the latest Harry Potter movie. Finally, as a longtime Trekkie, I am happy to report that the new Star Trek film beat out Bruno by around 20 places in these rankings.

Both the Palm Pre and BlackBerry were mentioned in the top 100 trends, and one of our top ten international apps, Spotify, earned a number 63 spot on the list for consistent chatter and news throughout the year. Bing and Google Voice each earned a spot lower on the list, coming in at 81 and 100 respectively.

Finally, to nod graciously in the direction of our good-natured rivals at Mashable, their Open Web Awards were the 27th most talked-about thing on Twitter this year. For a topic that didn’t appear until mid-October (and for a topic generated by a tech blog, no less), this is a great measure of success for which Pete Cashmore and his team are to be congratulated.

To get the full list, send an email to the folks at WhatTheTrend.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb

Facebook’s getting its own movie, Ashton Kutcher is the social web’s unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps.

What’s the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it’s often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing?

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Granted, we all have to discover technology at some point. None of us were born nerds. But there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that is unique to geeks: a melange of smarts, social pickiness, a willingness to be different, insatiable curiosity, a desire to learn and create new and amazing things, and frequently, a very necessary shell to protect oneself from the rejections of the larger world around us. As a people accustomed to being ostracized for speaking in terms too technical, having a bizarre sense of humor or caring more about bandwidth than baseball, we have generally existed far outside the cool kids’ club.

Not to frame my entire argument in a high school analogy, but we have mostly been useful for one thing: Doing other people’s homework. When they – the non-technical of this world – want an application, device, website or feature, we built it and teach them how to use it. This has been the geek’s role for eons: Doing the jocks’ dirty work and then skipping prom. Can you imagine Einstein hobnobbing with Marlene Deitrich? Or a young Steve Jobs on an early ’80s red carpet with a young Harrison Ford? Yet we are seeing more and more crossover between mainstream media and our little world of technology to the point that you can’t tell the tech from the tinsel.

Perhaps it’s just disconcerting to see those two worlds meshing for the first time. Perhaps all my angst is simply discomfort. Yet when I see and hear innovators and geeks referred to as ugly, graceless basement-dwellers, even in jest, by mainstream talking heads, it still gets to me.

But what gets to me more is the new set of faux geeks – folks who know just enough about tech to send a misspelled Twitter update from their mobiles but who thrive on the attention and revenue they gain from this scene. They wouldn’t know an API from a IP; the red carpet is more likely their natural habitat; yet they incessantly appear in blog posts, pictures and videos until the real geeks don’t even remember how they got there. It happens on a small scale (every tech scene has its skill-free new media douchebag), and it’s starting to happen on a larger scale, as well (why is Olivia Munn a geek, again?).

Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me cynical – but let me know what you think, too. Some of our friends on Twitter told us they didn’t like mainstream media’s encroachment onto geek territory, but others who responded to our query see this exposure as a good thing, and we want to hear this point of view, as well. After all, I was excited the first time I heard Twitter mentioned in a news report, too.

Give us your opinions in the comments, and don’t hold back! We love a good, long-winded discourse at ReadWriteWeb.

Note: Lest you throw stones at the writer for not being geeky enough herself, she was building LANs and playing the first version of King’s Quest when you were still in diapers.

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