Image captions are an often-overlooked element of Web design. They’re often thought of more in terms of function than form. As long as they include the proper photo credits or identifying information about the image subject, not much more thought is given to them.

By Andrew Lindstrom

It’s fascinating what information can be learned about a movie simply from taking a glance at the movie poster. Skipping past the obvious such as the title and cast, what is really interesting is determining a film’s tone and atmosphere from its poster alone. Is it violent? Funny? Scary? Quite often the poster alone may answer these questions for you.

The whole may be more than the sum of its parts, but without the parts, there is no whole. Lest that sound like some weird philosophical meandering to you, take comfort in observing the finer aspects of creative and appealing user interface design.

The following list bucks tradition by not being tied to one particular theme; although, as you’ll see, there are subtle threads running through them. While excellent, none of these designs are perfect, and I’ve pointed out room for improvement we can learn from.

by Vailancio Rodrigues and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team

By Robert Bowen and Smashing Editorial Team

By Jacob Gube

Some time ago I wrote an interesting post about how to implement a news ticker with automatic vertical scrolling (Newsvine.com-like) using MooTools.

In the past days a lot of people asked to me to modify the code of the news ticker, adding new features: in particular, Start/Resume options. So, today I released a "ready to use" script which you can use quickly on your web projects (take a look

by Tim Mercer and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team

Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.