To many, a ticket is probably just a piece of paper that allows someone to take part in an event, travel by a designated mode of transport, or watch a movie. We usually discard it after it has served its purpose so rarely do we give a thought to a creative ticket design. Truth is though, creatively designed tickets can actually go a long way when it comes to leaving an impression.

A well-designed ticket can make your next business event stand out and get people talking about it long before the day of the event. For many sentimental customers, tickets with creative designs also make great mementos of special events or movies. With that in mind, let’s check out these 20 creative ticket designs that will make it real hard for you to throw them away.

Recommended Reading: 15 Business Card Designs That Will Leave An Impression

MMM Ticket: Clown by BeNext

William Fitzsimmons Concert Ticket by Adam Butler

Tamarack Pig Roast Tickets by Theresa Garritano

The New Scene Theatre by Veronika Kokurina

UNLEASHED! 2011 by ACRE

Tune in for Fukushima by Hani Zuhair

Del Mar Thoroughbred Club Ticket by Amy Hood

AIR UNIVERS by Apo Li

ALLONS ENFANTS by Viviane Montesse

Murder on Cockatoo by Elki Lemmetty

FILM IS NOT DEAD! Branding by Yin Sze Loo

Ticketmaster Ticket Redesign by Matthew Lew

Placido Domingo by Aleksey Belyalov

Invites Round 2 by Linda Gavin

Shigeo Fukuda Museum Exhibition by Beck Mulkey

Some Tickets by Lode Bellens

A Night with Bossa Nova by Shawn Li

Ticket Design by Zeeshan Awan

Ticket Design by Gilbert Garcilazo

Luxury Night by Anneloes Visser

With more than 1 billion smartphone users worldwide, it’s not surprising to see that manufacturers are doing their best to come up with even more tech innovations for the mobile phone market. One such innovation that was introduced recently is the flexible phone. LG’s G Flex and Samsung’s Galaxy Round were the first phones to bring this innovation to the masses. Question is, do we really need a flexible phone?

(Image Source: BBC News)

While flexible display smartphones may seem like a wonderful innovation, I can think of many other innovations that I’d prefer to hear about rather than another flexible phone. Sure, we are pushing the limits with curved phones, but there are other mobile innovations that are also in development, innovations that carry more purpose and are more desirable. For instance…

Recommended Reading: 20 Gadgets That Make Your Smartphone Even Smarter

1. Better Batteries

It’s no secret that smartphone batteries die fast (and sometimes at the worst possible moment). Researchers have long recognized the problem and have been working hard to give us powerful batteries with more charge cycles and longer-lasting battery life. After all, you did spend hundreds if not thousands on those smartphones – better power management is always good news to power users.

Some of the many ongoing research projects include studies on larger batteries, batteries with Leyden’s electrolyte material, batteries with silicon, batteries with tin, etc. Imagine a future smartphone with a battery that charges in just five minutes but lasts for a full day!

2. Wireless Charging

If not longer-lasting batteries, then we would appreciate easier charging methods. Why are we still charging smartphones with cables when wireless charging is already available and implemented on phones such as Nokia Lumia 920 and LG Nexus 4?

(Image Source: Nokia Conversations)

Even better, while wireless charging usually makes use of the electromagnetic induction concept, researchers at the University of Washington have found a new way of charging: a technique called ambient backscatter. Using this technique, we can repurpose the wireless signals already present around us as both a power source and a communication medium.

Imagine a futuristic smartphone with an infinite battery life because it gets charged using the wireless signals from other devices (for example, signals from a television tower). In other words, there’ll be no need for a conventional power source.

3. Unbreakable Phones

If you have ever dropped a phone, you know how much it actually hurts. Fear not, Nokia is working to utilize a material called graphene, (billed as the world’s strongest material – 300 times stronger than stainless steel) in hopes of having a breakthrough in modern computing environments.

In short, if Nokia hits the jackpot with graphene, it may be used to make phones in the future, and we can finally have an unbreakable mobile phone that can survive a drop onto the pavement without too much of a bruising (to its exterior and to our wallets).

4. Stronger Screens

Stronger phones need stronger screens because we’d of course like all parts of the phone to be intact after a bad fall. The good news is mobile devices of the future may come with stronger screens that are made of materials like sapphire.

Apple may have introduced the use of sapphire in their Touch ID fingerprint scanner slash home button in their iPhone 5s but did you know there may be plans to use sapphire for screens as well — maybe in the iPhone 6?

(Image source: digitaltrends)

The man-made substance is thinner, more scratch-resistant and can be made lighter when used together with a thin layer of glass to reduce weight. Corning is also working on Gorilla Glass 3 which they claim can do what sapphire can do and more. In all cases, it’s good for consumers.

5. PaperTab

The iPad mini may be as thin as a pencil but what is the thinnest a tablet can get? PaperTab developers say paper thin. It looks like a piece of paper, and bends like one too but it is powered by an Intel processor and has a touchscreen display. Transfer of content is also as easy as touching one PaperTab to the next.

(Image source: Human Media Lab)

Although very thin, it still sports a 10.7-inch screen so you don’t suffer any lost in screen space. Researchers are currently working on improvising this revolutionary technology to make it available commercially. Flip phones may have been a thing of the past but one day, we might be able to fold our tablets and smartphones, like we would paper.

6. Contextual Intelligence

No matter how "smart" smartphones get, can it make decisions on your behalf? If it has the power of contextual intelligence (also known as practical intelligence), it may be able to. The phones will use sensors to get data about your physical surroundings and conditions, use saved information about you along with the contextual intelligence technology to make decisions for you even before you thought of the question.

7. Depth-Sensing Cameras

You know of 3D printing but have you heard of 3D scanning with a smartphone? Depth-sensing cameras will allow for handheld 3D scanning, augmented reality games, and better photo-taking capabilities in future smartphones. Imagine an arcade game that scans your house and builds a game challenge using the objects, walls and map of your own house.

Occipital, the company behind Structure Sensor (the first mobile depth-sensing technology), has already developed apps that will enable us to scan objects or even entire rooms in 3D.

(Image source: structure.io)

8. Augmented Reality

Augmented reality uses camera and sensors of your smartphone to add layers of useful digital information – text, videos, photos, sounds – directly on top of the items around you. Imagine standing in front of an unknown museum and pointing your smartphone towards it, and your phone shows details of the exhibit as you line your phone up towards the item.

(Image source: commons.wikimedia.org)

Also imagine pointing your phone towards a movie poster to get the movie’s release date, cast, showtimes, and ticket booking options, a restaurant to find its star rating or a hotel to find available rooms.

Read Also: How Augmented Reality Is The Next Big Social Experience

9. Multi-Screen Capabilities

Why limit the display you get to the screen size when you can expand your view with multi-screen capabilities? The idea is to connect and share the screen of your smartphone with your tablet, television or projector with no limitations imposed by different platforms or OS, and irrespective of make or form.

(Image Source: Samsung)

We already have Miracast, a technology that makes it possible to display videos seamlessly between various devices without wires or even a network connection. Samsung has also launched MultiScreen SDK, which allows Android and iOS apps to connect and show content on SmartTVs.

Read Also: Screencast Your Android Display To Apple TV With Mirror App

10. Infrared Support

Hate looking for the remote because it keeps running of and hiding in couches? Turn your smartphone into a remote control. Pioneered by HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, smartphones are now equipped with integrated IR blasters and remote control applications (e.g. "My Room" in Galaxy S4).

What does this mean? Well, you can convert your smartphone into a remote control which works with your regular not-smart TV. At least if this remote control goes missing, you can give it a call.

(Image Source: CNET)

11. Dual Recording

Existing smartphones come with front and rear cameras but only one of them works at a time. Future smartphones may have better camera support to allow simultaneous recording using both cameras. In fact, some phones such as the LG Optimus G Pro and Samsung Galaxy S4 already have this feature.

(Image Source: Kārlin Dāmbrans)

Dual recording technology will give rise to innovative and specialized camera apps which will open new possibilities for creative recording. Imagine one day, recording a dance routine on the TV, along with your own dance performance in a single video using this dual recording feature.

Final Thought

There is a world of possibilities in the field of mobile innovations, so perhaps we need to open our ways and look beyond the headlines. Feel free to share with us any other mobile innovations you know of and are looking forward to.

Android has always been known for being heavily customizable, but the amount of work needed can sometimes be daunting. Having to look for and install custom icons, launcher themes and widgets can be a lot of work and take away the fun of actually customizing your Android device.

If you’ve always wanted to customize your Android home screen beyond just changing the wallpaper, but never had the time or energy, Themer might just be the app for you. Themer is a launcher from MyColorScreen that brings easy one-touch customization to Android. It comes bundled with themes from MyColorScreen that you can apply with just a few quick taps.

Interested? Read on.

Recommended Reading: Pimp Your Android Homescreen With Buzz Launcher

Getting Started With Themer

Before we get started, there are a few things you need to be aware of. Firstly, Themer requires Android 4.0 and above. Secondly, Themer won’t work on just any Android 4.0+ device: Themer doesn’t support tablets or devices with 320×480 and 480×584 resolutions. There’s also a number of specific devices that aren’t supported by Themer, all of which you can find here.

If your device fits the bill, go ahead and download Themer here. Themer runs as a launcher, so once you have it installed, press your device’s Home button and the Select a home app window should appear. Just select Launcher and then tap on Always to make it your default launcher.

Once you’re in Themer, you’ll be greeted by a short series of introduction screens. Just swipe all the way to the right and press Browse Themes to get to the main theme selection interface.

To install a theme, simply find one you like, tap on it and then tap Apply. You’ll be prompted to log in either with your Google or Facebook account before Themer begins downloading the theme.

Once the theme has finished downloading, Themer will automatically apply it and return you to your freshly-themed home screen.

Themer Features And Customization

As with any self-respecting launcher, Themer has a number of additional options that you can access, including some basic customization. Long press on a blank section of any of your home screens and an options menu will pop up. From here, you can access most of Themer’s settings and customization options.

You can get to the Themer Settings or add Widgets, Homescreens and something called Smart Categories. These Smart Categories, including categories such as Games, Health & Fitness and Sports, are automatically populated with apps you have installed on your phone.

As far as widgets are concerned, Themer comes with a number of its own custom widgets, including a handy customizable Everything Widget. As if that wasn’t enough, Themer also comes bundled with Zooper, a minimal yet extremely customizable widget that should be able to fulfill any and all of your widget needs.

The main Themer Settings menu is where you access and customize basic Themer functions. Here you can customize your App Preferences, Weather reporting, App Drawer, Gestures, Unread Email Account and RSS feeds. Since icons in Themer themes don’t necessarily link to any apps by default, the App Preferences are there so that you can define the apps that Themer icons will launch.

Going back to your previous launcher is remarkably easy. Just tap on Restore Old Homescreen in the Themer Settings menu and the Select a home app popup menu will appear. Simply choose your old launcher and press Always.

Limitations

While Themer offers customization options for the app drawer, there isn’t really much you can do with the appearance of the themes. Admittedly, this may not be a huge problem, since there are so many pre-bundled, complete themes to choose from anyway.

Another thing to be aware of is that Themer is still in open beta and thus there may be bugs and quirks that still need to be ironed out, and features to be added. For one, the launcher itself doesn’t support landscape orientation. As far as bugs are concerned, I didn’t encounter any significant issues during my time with the app, but your mileage may vary.

All in all, though, if you want to theme your Android smartphone without going through the hassle of changing things one by one, you could do worse than give Themer a go.

I’m sure you know of SEO tips you can use on your site. We have previously published an ultimate guide to Web Optimization (Tips & Best Practices) as well as a mini-series for a Beginner’s Guide to SEO (check out Part 2 and Part 3 as well).

If you want to optimize SEO for your images, there is Jake’s ultimate guide to JPEG optimization for the Web and of course plenty of tools you can use to help you check your site performance and speeds. If however you want to check out how to create an SEO-friendly image portfolio for your site, here are 7 quicktips you can manipulate to help make your images more SEO-friendly.

Recommended Reading: 9 WordPress Plugins To Improve Image Performance

1. Image Sitemaps

A not-so-frequently used tactic is creating an Image Sitemap to list all the images on your site, in a nice, neat XML fashion. The main reason behind this is image discoverability, especially for images which are accessed through scripts. The practice is simple and future search engine algorithm updates will take this trick into account more and more. You can just add an image sitemap to your current sitemap.

Here’s an article from Google giving details on third-party tools to help you.

2. Giving Credit

Always link back to the creator of the image when you present images which aren’t of your own doing or owned by you. Make sure it’s do-follow, not no-follow. It’s a best practice which comes from the King of Search, Google. Your image search engine results will be glad you did, and it’s going to save you a lot of trouble from angry image creators.

3. Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets containing photos are great. If you have an online business, find a single image which best represents you. Here’s a great article from Google on how to implement this (even listing a tool for testing). Doing this will lower your bounce rates and increase your click-through rates, while helping the main image rank better.

Read Also: How To Use "In-Depth Article" Feature To Improve Site Traffic

4. Backlinking To Images

This works exactly like normal on-page or off-page SEO backlinking. Try to link to your own site’s images from within, with descriptive, long-tail keywords. If you can get other high PR sites to link back to a specific image, that’s great! Oh, and don’t spam the anchor text with too many keywords. A 4-word anchor text is long enough.

And if you want to optimize your images for local SERPs, use long-tail keywords containing the name of the city or desired area in the anchor text.

5. EXIF Data

The EXIF information is usually pre-compiled data, created by devices you take pictures on. The information is embedded into the photo. But get this, you can alter it to contain your desired keywords, your site’s name and any other information. The amount of detail which goes into this is amazing.

You can meddle with the date, hour, height, author, device type and about 20 other things categorized as image data in the exchangeable image file format (e.g. EXIF).

6. Captions

Having captions for each and every image presented on your site can do wonders for your bounce rates, and that in turn can increase your rankings. While this technique isn’t listed as a best practice, it’s obvious that photos are "helped" by captions. Your captions should be funny though. Humor decreases blood pressure, and is good for SEO.

7. Other Bounce Rate Tricks

Bounce Rates play a huge role in SEO. It makes sense. SERPs take into account if a visitor hits the back button too soon. That can mean he wasn’t interested in that page (or didn’t even mean to click in at all). You want each visitor to stay on your image page as much as possible. Here are a few tips:

• An image should never be without text next to it. Not only captions. Have some text wrapped around the actual photo. Make sure it’s relevant both in human and robotic eyes (e.g. long-tail keywords).
• No pixelated photos allowed. Have a balance between file size and quality.
• Standardized image sizes. If you’re presenting a bunch of images, make sure they’re similar in width and height.

Compared to other web-related languages, CSS is relatively straightforward and easy to write. But at the same time, it is also hard to organize, particularly when it comes to codes that consist of thousands of lines.

It would be great if we’re able to organize CSS and make it easier for other developers to read and maintain the codes – which is useful if you are working in a team.

In this post, we are going to show you how to sort and organize CSS using a tool called CSSComb. But first, let’s take a look at a short example on CSS property ordering.

Recommended Reading: CSS Back To Basics: – Terminology Explained

Technically, CSS has no restrictions when it comes to ordering properties. The following example…

 .class { background-color: #f3f3f3; width: 100px; height: 100px; font-color: #000; } 

… will output the same result as the following:

 .class { width: 100px; font-color: #000; background-color: #f3f3f3; height: 100px; } 

But as we’ve mentioned previously, being organized will help your teammates easily maintain your codes. Sorting CSS codes, however, requires a lot of cutting & pasting, and thoughts on how to order it. And that’s where CSSComb comes in handy.

How to Use CSSComb

CSSComb is a sorting utility for CSS that is built by Slava Oliyanchuk. CSSComb supports CSS2 to CSS4, and is available in many popular code editors such as TextMate, Coda, Notepad++ and Sublime Text, as a plugin or an extension.

If you are using Sublime Text, CSSComb can be installed easily via the Package Control. Once installed, you can sort the CSS properties in several ways:

• Hit the default key combination: Shift + Ctrl + C.
• Right-click and select: Sort via CSSComb option.
• Open Command Palette – Command + Shift + P and select Sort via CSSComb.

In this example, we have the following style rule.

 .class { padding-top: 1px; border-left: 1px solid #fff; -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; border-right: 1px solid #fff; height: 23px; padding-bottom: 10px; background-color: #fff; } 

The style rule above works, and there is nothing wrong with it, except that it’s a bit unorganized. Now, after running CSSComb, the properties are sorted in the following order.

 .site-header > .container { padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 10px; height: 23px; border-right: 1px solid #fff; border-left: 1px solid #fff; background-color: #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 #000; } 

Above is the default ordering rule in CSSComb, but if you don’t want to order it like that, you can customize the order, by going to the Preferences > Package Setting > CSSComb menu, and set ting a new order rule under Sort Order – User.

Note: If you are using a code editor that does not have the extension or plugin, CSSComb is also available as a webtool.