Top Design News
13. Oktober 2025
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The Grayscale Problem
From A/B tests to AI slop, the modern web is bleeding out its colour. Standardized, templated, and overoptimized, it’s starting to feel like a digital Levittown. But it doesn’t have to be.
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Smashing Animations Part 5: Building Adaptive SVGs With `
`, ``, And CSS Media Queries SVGs, they scale, yes, but how else can you make them adapt even better to several screen sizes? Web design pioneer Andy Clarke explains how he builds what he calls “adaptive SVGs” using ``, ``, and CSS Media Queries. -
Intent Prototyping: A Practical Guide To Building With Clarity (Part 2)
Ready to move beyond static mockups? Here is a practical, step-by-step guide to Intent Prototyping — a disciplined method that uses AI to turn your design intent (UI sketches, conceptual models, and user flows) directly into a live prototype, making it your primary canvas for ideation.
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Shades Of October (2025 Wallpapers Edition)
How about some new wallpapers to get your desktop ready for fall and the upcoming Halloween season? We’ve got you covered! Following our monthly tradition, the wallpapers in this post were created with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!
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From Prompt To Partner: Designing Your Custom AI Assistant
What if your best AI prompts didn’t disappear into your unorganized chat history, but came back tomorrow as a reliable assistant? In this article, you’ll learn how to turn one-off “aha” prompts into reusable assistants that are tailored to your audience, grounded in your knowledge, and consistent every time, saving you (and your team) from typing the same 448-word prompt ever again.
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Intent Prototyping: The Allure And Danger Of Pure Vibe Coding In Enterprise UX (Part 1)
Yegor Gilyov examines the problem of over-reliance on static high-fidelity mockups, which often leave the conceptual model and user flows dangerously underdeveloped. He then explores whether AI-powered prototyping is the answer, questioning whether the path forward is the popular “vibe coding” approach or a more structured, intent-driven approach.
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Ambient Animations In Web Design: Principles And Implementation (Part 1)
Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it’s distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In this article, web design pioneer Andy Clarke introduces the concept of ambient animations and explains how to implement them.
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The Psychology Of Trust In AI: A Guide To Measuring And Designing For User Confidence
With digital products moving to incorporate generative and agentic AI at an increasingly frequent rate, trust has become the invisible user interface. When it works, interactions feel seamless. When it fails, the entire experience collapses. But trust isn’t mystical. It can be understood, measured, and designed for. Here are practical methods and strategies for designing more trustworthy and ethical AI systems.
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How To Minimize The Environmental Impact Of Your Website
As responsible digital professionals, we are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impact of our work and need to find effective and pragmatic ways to reduce it. James Chudley shares a new decarbonising approach that will help you to minimise the environmental impact of your website, benefiting people, profit, purpose, performance, and the planet.
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SerpApi: A Complete API For Fetching Search Engine Data
From competitive SEO research and monitoring prices to training AI and parsing local geographic data, real-time search results power smarter apps. Tools like SerpApi make it easy to pull, customize, and integrate this data directly into your app or website.
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Functional Personas With AI: A Lean, Practical Workflow
For too long, personas have been created with considerable effort, only to offer limited value. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way.
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Creating Elastic And Bounce Effects With Expressive Animator
Elastic and bounce effects have long been among the most desirable but time-consuming techniques in motion design. Expressive Animator streamlines the process, making it possible to produce lively animations in seconds, bypassing the tedious work of manual keyframe editing.
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From Data To Decisions: UX Strategies For Real-Time Dashboards
Real-time dashboards are decision assistants, not passive displays. In environments like fleet management, healthcare, and operations, the cost of a delay or misstep is high. Karan Rawal explores strategic UX patterns that shorten time-to-decision, reduce cognitive overload, and make live systems trustworthy.
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Integrating CSS Cascade Layers To An Existing Project
The idea behind this is to share a full, unfiltered look at integrating CSS Cascade Layers into an existing legacy codebase. In practice, it’s about refactoring existing CSS to use cascade layers without breaking anything.
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Designing For TV: Principles, Patterns And Practical Guidance (Part 2)
After covering in detail the underlying interaction paradigms of TV experiences in [Part 1](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/designing-tv-evergreen-pattern-shapes-tv-experiences/), it’s time to get practical. In the second part of the series, you’ll explore the building blocks of the “10-foot experience” and how to best utilise them in your designs.
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A Breeze Of Inspiration In September (2025 Wallpapers Edition)
Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a new collection of desktop wallpapers? We’ve got some eye-catching designs to make your September just a bit more colorful. Enjoy!
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Prompting Is A Design Act: How To Brief, Guide And Iterate With AI
Prompting is more than giving AI some instructions. You could think of it as a design act, part creative brief and part conversation design. This second article on AI augmenting design work introduces a designerly approach to prompting: one that blends creative briefing, interaction design, and structural clarity.
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Designing For TV: The Evergreen Pattern That Shapes TV Experiences (Part 1)
TV interface design is a unique, fascinating, and often overlooked field. It’s been guided by decades of evolution and innovation, yet still firmly constrained by its legacy. Follow Milan into the history, quirks, and unshakable rules that dictate how we control these devices.
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Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a great way to make apps built for the web feel native, but in moving away from a browser environment, we can introduce usability issues. This article covers how we can modify our app depending on what display mode is applied to mitigate these issues.
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A Week In The Life Of An AI-Augmented Designer
If you are new to using AI in design or curious about integrating AI into your UX process without losing your human touch, this article offers a grounded, day-by-day look at introducing AI into your design workflow.
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The Double-Edged Sustainability Sword Of AI In Web Design
AI has introduced huge efficiencies for web designers and is frequently being touted as the key to unlocking sustainable design and development. But do these gains outweigh the environmental cost of using energy-hungry AI tools?
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Beyond The Hype: What AI Can Really Do For Product Design
AI tools are improving fast, but it’s still not clear how they fit into a real product design workflow. Nikita Samutin walks through four core stages — from analytics and ideation to prototyping and visual design — to show where AI fits and where it doesn’t, illustrated with real-world examples.
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The Psychology Of Color In UX And Digital Products
Rodolpho Henrique guides you through the essential aspects of color in digital design and user experience, from the practical steps of creating effective and scalable color palettes to critical accessibility considerations.
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From Line To Layout: How Past Experiences Shape Your Design Career
Your past shapes who you are as a designer, no matter where your career began or how unexpected your career path may have been. Stephanie Campbell shows how those lessons can sharpen your instincts, strengthen collaboration, and help you become a better designer today.
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Designing With AI, Not Around It: Practical Advanced Techniques For Product Design Use Cases
Prompting isn’t just about writing better instructions, but about designing better thinking. Ilia and Marina explore how advanced prompting can empower different product & design use cases, speeding up your workflow and improving results, from research and brainstorming to testing and beyond. Let’s dive in.
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The Power Of The
Intl
API: A Definitive Guide To Browser-Native InternationalizationInternationalization isn’t just translation. It’s about formatting dates, pluralizing words, sorting names, and more, all according to specific locales. Instead of relying on heavy third-party libraries, modern JavaScript offers the Intl API — a powerful, native way to handle i18n. A quiet reminder that the web truly is worldwide. -
Automating Design Systems: Tips And Resources For Getting Started
Design systems are more than style guides: they’re made up of workflows, tokens, components, and documentation — all the stuff teams rely on to build consistent products. As projects grow, keeping everything in sync gets tricky fast. In this article, we’ll look at how smart tooling, combined with automation where it makes sense, can speed things up, reduce errors, and help your team focus on design over maintenance.
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UX Job Interview Helpers
Talking points. Smart questions. A compelling story. This guide helps you prepare for your UX job interview. And remember: no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
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Stories Of August (2025 Wallpapers Edition)
Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of desktop wallpapers might be for you. The wallpapers are designed with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free! Enjoy!
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The Core Model: Start FROM The Answer, Not WITH The Solution
The Core Model is a practical methodology that flips traditional digital development on its head. Instead of starting with solutions or structure, we begin with a hypothesis about what users need and follow a simple framework that brings diverse teams together to create more effective digital experiences. By asking six good questions in the right order, teams align around user tasks and business objectives, creating clarity that transcends organizational boundaries.
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Web Components: Working With Shadow DOM
Web Components are more than just Custom Elements. Shadow DOM, HTML Templates, and Custom Elements each play a role. In this article, Russell Beswick demonstrates how Shadow DOM fits into the broader picture, explaining why it matters, when to use it, and how to apply it effectively.
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Designing Better UX For Left-Handed People
Today, roughly 10% of people are left-handed. Yet most products — digital and physical — aren’t designed with it in mind. Let’s change that. More design patterns in Smart Interface Design Patterns, a **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.
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Handling JavaScript Event Listeners With Parameters
Event listeners are essential for interactivity in JavaScript, but they can quietly cause memory leaks if not removed properly. And what if your event listener needs parameters? That’s where things get interesting. Amejimaobari Ollornwi shares which JavaScript features make handling parameters with event handlers both possible and well-supported.
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Why Non-Native Content Designers Improve Global UX
Ensuring your product communicates clearly to a global audience is not just about localisation. Even for products that have a proper localisation process, English often remains the default language for UI and communications. This article focuses on how you can make English content clear and inclusive for non-native users. Oleksii offers a practical guide based on his own experience as a non-native English-speaking content designer, defining the user experience for international companies.
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Tiny Screens, Big Impact: The Forgotten Art Of Developing Web Apps For Feature Phones
Learn why flip phones still matter in 2025, and how you can build and launch web apps for these tiny devices.
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Design Patterns For AI Interfaces
Designing a new AI feature? Where do you even begin? Here’s a simple, practical overview with useful design patterns for better AI experiences.
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Unmasking The Magic: The Wizard Of Oz Method For UX Research
The Wizard of Oz method is a proven UX research tool that simulates real interactions to uncover authentic user behavior. Victor Yocco unpacks the core principles of the WOZ method, explores advanced real-world applications, and highlights its unique value, including its relevance in the emerging field of agentic AI.
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Droip: The Modern Website Builder WordPress Needed
Traditional page builders have shaped how we build WordPress sites for years. Let’s take a closer look at [Droip](https://droip.com/), a modern, no-code visual builder, and explore how it redefines the experience with cleaner performance, full design freedom, and zero plugin dependency.
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Design Guidelines For Better Notifications UX
As always in design, timing matters, and so do timely notifications. Let’s explore how we might improve the notifications UX. More design patterns in our Smart Interface Design Patterns, a friendly video course on UX and design patterns by Vitaly — from complex data tables and nested filters to FAQs and error messages.
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CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language
CSS has evolved from a purely presentational language into one with growing logical powers — thanks to features like container queries, relational pseudo-classes, and the `if()` function. Is it still just for styling, or is it becoming something more? Gabriel Shoyombo explores how smart CSS has become over the years, where it is heading, the challenges it addresses, whether it is becoming too complex, and how developers are reacting to this shift.