Two years ago, we launched the Smashing Email Newsletter. Today, we’d like to reflect on some of the greatest newsletter articles of the past year and celebrate this anniversary with our 100,000 readers with a fabulous book giveaway!

Back then, we planned to launch the Smashing Newsletter only if we had at least 10,001 subscribers who were interested in receiving the newsletter; and indeed, we managed to reach over 17,300 subscribers! Up to the present day, our newsletter is being sent out to more than 100,000 readers and we have promised ourselves to do our best to make their subscriptions worthwhile. Every two weeks, we hunt down obscure blogs, useful tools, valuable techniques as well as quality goodies, and present them to our readers in short bits and pieces in our newsletter issues.

As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese is a difficult language, isn’t it?”. Those asking are often surprised when my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”.

While it is true (at least to many Westerners) that Japanese is an exotic language, when compared to learning other European languages, it may seem harder because it has has no relation to their own language. But from my own experiences of learning English and German (and also from seeing some European friends learning Japanese), I can say with confidence that learning spoken Japanese is, in fact, not so difficult.

The WordPress Admin Bar, first introduced in version 3.1, debuted to mixed reactions. A Google search for “wordpress admin bar” returns multiple articles about how to disable or remove it. Version 3.2 of WordPress introduced new features and functionality, and version 3.3 has not only further enhanced it but integrated the header of the admin section into the bar itself.

Since this feature is not going anywhere and it figures largely in WordPress’ plan to implement front-end editing, I think we would all benefit from looking at where its features come from and how best to make this sometimes controversial feature work for us.

A lot of community extensions (or modules) are available for the feature-rich open-source e-commerce solution Magento but what if they don’t quite work as you want them to? What if you could understand the structure of a Magento module a little better, to the point that you could modify it to suit your needs or, better yet, write your own module from scratch?

In this tutorial, we will introduce the coding of Magento in the form of a “Hello World”-style module. The goal of the module will be simply to write some information to a log file every time a product is saved. This very basic module will allow us to cover a number of interesting topics.

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.

We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for March 2012. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please note that:

• All images can be clicked on 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?

Life and nature are one big transition. The sun slowly rises to mark a new day and then slowly sets to mark the end of the day and the beginning of night. We are created in the womb and from small cells we grow, are born and gradually age until we die.

Perhaps these natural transitions in life are what make artificial transitions feel… well, right. Sometimes, though, when something jumps from one state to another, it feels OK but doesn’t quite feel right.

Depending on who you follow and what you read, you may have noticed the concept of “responsive text” being discussed in design circles recently. It’s not what you might imagine — resizing and altering the typography to make it easier to read on a range of devices — but rather delivering varying amounts of content to devices based on screen size.

One example of this is an experiment by designer Frankie Roberto. Another is the navigation menu on the website for Sifter App. Roberto and Sifter are using media queries to actually hide and display text based on screen size (i.e. not rewriting or delivering different content based on context — as one would do with mobile-focused copy, for example).

As Web designers and developers, each project we work with has a unique set of goals and requirements. But one goal we have for all of our projects is that we want them to make an impression on people — we want the websites that we create to be memorable.

A fun experience is often an enjoyable one and an enjoyable experience is usually a memorable one. Therefore, it stands to reason that one of the ways to create a memorable experience is to make it a fun experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at how adding a bit of “fun” into the mix can help us produce more engaging, and hopefully more successful, websites.

Hick’s Law has always been a popular reference point for designers. You’ll find it cited in the endless lists of basic laws and principles that all designers should be familiar with. Given our assumed comfort level with this design cornerstone, I am surprised to see so many people getting it wrong.

What we think we understand about Hick’s Law as it pertains to Web design is oversimplified and incomplete. We need to more deeply investigate what Hick’s Law can do for Web design. In the end, we will see why this design principle is undervalued, and we will see how we have been designing incorrectly for the user’s decision-making process. In order to get there, we need to look at our current approach to Hick’s Law and why it’s wrong.

Paper.js, Processing.js and Raphaël are the leading libraries for drawing on the Web right now. A couple of others are up and coming, and you can always use Flash, but these three work well with HTML5 and have the widest support among browser vendors.

Choosing the right framework will determine the success of your project. This article covers the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the information you need to make the best choice.