Once again, it’s time to join in on a Smashing Magazine photography contest. You might remember or took part in our popular Coffee Mug Contest in 2011, which drew over 470 entries. This time, we are not interested in the vessel that holds your daily intake of caffeine, but rather in the object that fuels your creativity and inspiration.

Have a look around, choose the object that sparks your most creative thoughts and solutions, take a picture from an interesting perspective, and share it with us!

Submission Guidelines

You may use any camera you like, whether a toy cam, mobile phone, SLR or point-and-shoot. Please keep in mind that the poster will consist of many photographs (the coffee mug poster accommodated 150 entries!). So, submit a picture that would also have significance among such a collection of entries.

• The photo must be in JPG format, at a maximum size of 4000 × 3000 pixels. The file size should not exceed 8 MB.
• Each participant may send only one photo.
• The photo should focus on a single item. Please do not send a picture of an entire wall or desk.
• Name your photo with your full name (for example, john-peterson.jpg).
• Create a file in TXT format including the title of your picture and a short description. Name it also with your full name (for example, john-peterson.txt).
• Pack your plain image and your description file in an archive — please use only ZIP, RAR or 7-ZIP.
• If your email app cannot handle a large file, consider using a sharing service such as Dropbox or WeTransfer.
• You must own the copyright of the photo you submit.
• Submit your photo to the email address photos [at] smashingmagazine [dot] com by June 12th, 2013.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

(Image: Keoni Cabral )

(Image: Lawrence Rayner)

(Image: Ryan Aiyappa)

(Image: Ashish)

(Image: Alex G.)

(Image: vvaldzen)

(Image: Kathryn Rotondo)

What Can You Win?

The best entries and their photographers will be included in a huge poster created exclusively for this contest. The poster will be printed in a limited edition of 20 and will not be for sale. It will be awarded to 10 photographers of the most creative and original entries in the contest.

In additon, the best entries will also be rewarded with one of the four book gifts presented below, along with Cody, the one and only Smashing mascot. So… what are you waiting for?

Kern and Burn
“Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs” is a beautiful two-color book that features candid conversations with 30 leading designers who have founded startups, channeled personal passions into self-made careers and taken risks to do what they love.

The Shape Of Design
“The Shape of Design” is a meditation on the design process and the work’s potential effect when released.

The Manual, Volume I Gift Set
Includes issues #1, #2, and #3 of “The Manual”, a thrice-yearly publication on Web design as a discipline, capturing the voices of our profession as they explore what we do and who we are as designers.

An extra to your book of choice: Cody!

Deadline & Announcement

Please submit your photo by June 12th at the latest. Qualifying submissions and the winners will be announced soon after. We will showcase the most interesting photos here on Smashing Magazine (and in the big poster, of course), including the names of the contributors.

Please note that your photo will be used only for this event, and you will retain the full rights to it.

Join In!

Send your photo to photos@smashingmagazine.com! We look forward to your shots, folks!

(al) (ea) (il)

© Melanie Lang for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

New pricing schemes, content deals, and technologies are challenging net neutrality.

This fall, Verizon will try to persuade a federal judge to throw out U.S. Federal Communications Commission regulations requiring “net neutrality”—the idea that all content and applications must get similar treatment on wired and wireless networks.

In this article we look at CSS3 Playground, another web-based tool for creating CSS3 Layouts.

The following is a guest post by Alexander Futekov. We recently published an article by Joshua Bader in which a 3D inset look was adjusted as the page scrolled to give it a more realistic interaction. This is similar only Alexander is using an extruded look on buttons and employing a totally different technique.

The introduction of CSS3 resulted in the explosion of beautiful and interesting buttons, styled with gradients, shadows, and borders - often to achieve a 3D effect. The problem with such 3D buttons is a static perspective. The 3D is not always very convincing when you can only see its front and perhaps a bit from an edge or two - even when the page moves and the position of the button on the page moves.

Fortunately, we can achieve a realistic perspective effect with the help of 3D transforms to adjust the sides of the buttons. We can do this without modifying existing HTML, by using pseudo elements for the sides. Then bring forward the button itself with translateZ.

Before we start, we must first solve a problem. The perspective origin point is usually set at the vertical and horizontal center of the element. This means that when we set it based on the body we will get something like this:

By setting the height of the body to be 100%, we can fix the perspective origin point to the center of the viewport like this:

html {
      height: 100%;
      overflow: hidden;
    }
    
    body {
      height: 100%;
      overflow-y: scroll;
    }

For a simple <button>, here's the CSS:

button {
      position: relative;
      display: inline-block;
      padding: 4px 16px;
      border: 0;
      background-color: blue;
      background-image: radial-gradient(ellipse at top, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.15) 50%, transparent);
      color: #222;
      transform-style: preserve-3d;
      transform: translateZ(20px);
    }
    
    button::before {
      content: "";
      position: absolute;
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      left: 0;
      top: 0;
      transform-origin: 0% 0%;
      transform: rotateX(-90deg);
    }
    
    button::after {
      content: "";
      position: absolute;
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      left: 0;
      top: 0;
      transform-origin: 0% 0%;
      transform: rotateY(90deg);
    }

But how do we get 4 sides for each button with just 2 pseudo elements? JavaScript! if we want to avoid adding extra wrappers to each button (we do) we need scripting to move the top side down and the left side to the right depending on where the button is relative to the user's viewport. The script for switching the top with the bottom side of the button is pretty straightforward - changing top/bottom or right/lest sides occurs only on load and on resize, and top/bottom only on scroll:

$(window).on("load resize", function() {
      topHalf();
      leftHalf();
    });
    
    $("body").scroll(function() {
      topHalf();
    });
    
    function topHalf() {
      $("button").each(function() {
        var self = $(this),
            offTop = self.offset().top,
            scrTop = $(window).scrollTop(),
            halfWindowHeight = ($(window).height())/2;
    
        self.toggleClass("top-half", (offTop - scrTop) < halfWindowHeight);
      });
    }
    
    function leftHalf() {
      $("button").each(function() {
        var self = $(this),
            offLeft = self.offset().left,
            halfWindowWidth = ($(window).width())/2;
    
        self.toggleClass("left-half", offLeft < halfWindowWidth);
      });
    }

Editor's note: This could certainly be refactored a bit to lend structure and gain some efficiency. Feel free to fork the Pen below and have a go!

Some new classes will help position the sides:

button.top-half::before {
      top: auto;
      bottom: 0;
      transform-origin: 100% 100%;
      transform: rotateX(90deg);
    }
    
    button.left-half::after {
      left: auto;
      right: 0;
      transform-origin: 100% 100%;
      transform: rotateY(-90deg);
    }

Keep in mind that if you use classes to float the buttons (for example .pull-left and .pull-right like in Twitter Bootstrap) you will know where each button is positioned horizontally and thus be able to skip half of the JavaScript code.

Here's a styled demo to play around with. It has an animated push-down effect for the buttons and includes some other 3D elements that don't requre any JavaScript:

Check out this Pen!

A similar technique can also be used to replicate the 3D Inset Parallax Effect in a very rough way. It's a bit more complex, but doesn't require any JavaScript:

Check out this Pen!

Need a new look for your portfolio? Check out the Snap WordPress theme from The Theme Foundry. Sass files and Compass config are included!

3D Button Parallax is a post from CSS-Tricks

W3C is pleased to invite the Japanese developer community to attend the first ever W3C developer meetup, in Tokyo, Japan, on Saturday 8 June 2013. Chaired by Marie-Claire Forgue (W3C) and Kensaku Komatsu (NTT Communications), the event's agenda consists of a mix of presentations and demonstrations by W3C members and staff, on topics such as HTML5, CSS3, Web Security, Testing, etc. Web designers and application developers are encouraged to gather for an evening of discussions and networking. Participation in the meetup is open to anyone at no cost, but space is limited. Please register before 6 June 2013. W3C warmly thanks both GREE for hosting the event and html5j for additional support.

Sometimes you need a fully-fledged CMS; something that lets you create any kind of website you want to create, with tons of bells and whistles. But other times you want a simple, elegant blogging platform. One that’s open source. And maybe even fun to use.

Ghost is a new blogging platform from John O’Nolan and team, that’s all of those things, and that’s being funded via Kickstarter. They already have a working prototype, and their Kickstarter campaign is just about wrapping up: they’ve raised over 5 times their goal.

One of the biggest advantages Ghost has over most existing blogging platforms is that it works natively with markdown. If you’re not already using markdown for your writing, you’re seriously missing out (and wasting a lot of time writing markup instead of content). With Ghost, you write markdown in the left-hand panel and you get a live preview of your content on the right-hand panel. It saves you time and gives you an instant look at what you’re writing, without having to switch back and forth to a preview (or constantly save and refresh).

Ghost’s dashboard in general is beautiful and way more efficient than most. It puts all of your important data in one place, including traffic stats, social media, content performance, and news feed. It lets you stay on top of what’s happening with your blog, all in one place, rather than clicking through multiple tabs to find what you need.

Ghost’s design is fully responsive, so you can use it on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or virtually any other web-connected device. And it’s not just limited functionality on these other devices; it all works.

If you want to extend Ghost’s functionality, you can write plugins for it. There are no restrictions on what you can do with it, really, since it’s licensed under the MIT license with no restrictions.

Ghost’s Kickstarter campaign was a wild success. Within the first twelve hours, they’d already reached 120% of their goal. And in a week they were 410% funded. That’s pretty amazing, especially for a project that doesn’t have a physical “product”. Within 2-4 weeks of the end of the campaign, VIP level (and higher) backers will start getting access. Access to others will roll out in the weeks after that.

In addition to the version of Ghost you can download and host yourself, there’s also going to be a hosted version of Ghost. They plan to have at least one hosting option that’s under $9 per month, though details aren’t clear yet.

One of the great things about Ghost, though, is the fact that it’s being set up as a non-profit organization. That means they’re not going to be sold to Yahoo! for over a billion dollars. It also means they’re not selling you to advertisers. Instead, they’re creating something for the community, and for their users, without regard to making a profit. They only need to generate enough revenue to keep going, rather than to make shareholders happy.

I’m excited to see Ghost out in the wild. It looks like a well-conceived, well-planned, and well-executed new project, and one that’s sure to be a legitimate competitor in the blog platform market.

Will you try Ghost when it’s available? What other blogging platforms have you tried? Let us know in the comments.

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