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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December & Christmas 2009

Over the last months our readers were complaining about the low quality of wallpapers featured in the Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series here on Smashing Magazine. To keep the very high quality of the competition and motivate artists and designers to put more thoughts and ideas into creating original and beautiful wallpapers, we carefully reviewed our quality guidelines and decided to select featured wallpapers more strictly. Consequently, over 65% of wallpapers submitted to us in November unfortunately didn't make it to this post.

Smashing Wallpaper - december 09

We may have been a bit too strict or we may have been not strict enough – please let us know what you think and please also let us know how we can improve the quality of this series!

This post features 45 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 which wallpapers have we received for December 2009?

Read on Smashing Magazine...

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Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

Seeing as we are all human (well, presumably whoever is reading this post anyway), we should recognize that mistakes happen. They even have that saying, "To err is human…," which goes to show that it is not only commonplace for us to err once or twice: it is expected. But a method is behind this madness, because making mistakes is one of the major ways we learn. This is no different for freelancers.

Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

Finding our way over these bumps in the road often gives us valuable insight to take away. It helps us develop techniques and methods that we can incorporate into our creative process. As freelancers, we have the benefit of access to an entire online community that is willing to share its experiences so that we can learn without having to make the same mistakes.

So in this post, we look at 10 critical mistakes freelancers make. Hopefully, if you haven't already made one of these mistakes yourself, you can learn the lesson behind it.

Read on Smashing Magazine...

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Smashing Network Posts

From now on Smashing Magazine's front page features not only magazine's posts, but also manually selected articles from the members of our brand new Smashing Network. This page is updated several times per day, so it is worth checking more often.

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