Top Design News
19. März 2024
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Sketchnotes And Key Takeaways From SmashingConf Antwerp 2023
How was the first SmashingConf in Antwerp, you ask? One of our online attendees, Krisztina Szerovay, shares her sketchnotes and takeaways of the talks that were held on both days of the conference — with photos and recordings saved as best for last. See you live in Antwerp this year, maybe?
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Event Calendars For Web Made Easy With These Commercial Options
Collection of top-notch calendar components for seamless event scheduling. Whether you prefer ready-to-use setups or enjoy tweaking code for a tailored experience, these calendars have you covered.
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Success At Scale: Last Chance For Pre-Sale Price
Our next book, “Success at Scale” is finally at the printer, which means we’ll be shipping books soon. It’s also your last chance to get the book at the presale price. Get your copy and save now!
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Modern CSS Tooltips And Speech Bubbles (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this series, Temani Afif explored different CSS techniques to create tooltip shapes. The main challenge was to rely on a single element and create optimized code that could easily be controlled using CSS variables to update the size, shape, and position of the tail. In this second part, you are going explore more shapes.
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The End Of My Gatsby Journey
[“Gatsby headaches”](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/gatsby-headaches-i18n-part-1/) are over. Juan Diego Rodríguez reflects on his decision to stop using Gatsby as his go-to framework. Through a detailed examination of its strengths and weaknesses, he provides valuable insights and alternative options for developers navigating their tooling choices.
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Modern CSS Tooltips And Speech Bubbles (Part 1)
Tooltips are a very common pattern used in CSS for years. There are a lot of ways to approach tooltips in CSS, though some evoke headaches with all the magic numbers they require. In this article, Temani Afif presents modern techniques to create tooltips with the smallest amount of markup and the greatest amount of flexibility.
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Waiting For Spring (March 2024 Wallpapers Edition)
Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of desktop wallpapers is for you. Designed by artists and designers from across the globe, they come in versions with and without a calendar for March 2024. Enjoy!
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Reporting Core Web Vitals With The Performance API
The Performance API is a set of standards for measuring and evaluating performance metrics with JavaScript. This article demonstrates how to use the Performance API to generate performance metrics directly in the DOM to create your own reporting.
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A Web Designer’s Accessibility Advocacy Toolkit
Digital designer Yichan Wang has put together this collection of strategies and selling points to help you encourage and advocate for accessibility in your place of work, including useful scripts you can use as starting points.
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Vanilla JavaScript, Libraries, And The Quest For Stateful DOM Rendering
It’s well-established that the web faces wide-ranging usability and performance issues, from user-hostile UI patterns and twisted search results to sluggish performance and battery-draining bloat. In this article, Frederik examines one small-but-significant aspect where developers take the reins: Painting pixels on the screen.
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A Practical Guide To Designing For Colorblind People
Color accessibility is more than just ticking boxes. Even with good contrast, some color palettes can make interfaces challenging for users. Here are some practical guidelines to ensure more inclusive design for colorblind people. An upcoming part of Smart Interface Design Patterns.
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Mobile Accessibility Barriers For Assistive Technology Users
Accessibility goes beyond making products user-friendly. It can significantly impact the quality of life for people with disabilities. Kate Kalcevich shares lessons she learned from assistive technology users — challenges and barriers they encounter on mobile devices.
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How Accessibility Standards Can Empower Better Chart Visual Design
Accessibility for data visualization extends well beyond web standards, at least if you’re trying to create an experience that’s actually useful. This article focuses on techniques for creating useful and accessible visualizations that extend well beyond compliance.
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A Practical Guide To Designing For Children
How to design for children aged 3–12, with insights into user behavior, considerations for parents, and practical UX guidelines.
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How To Draw Radar Charts In Web
A radar chart — also commonly called a spider chart — is yet another way to visualize data and make connections. Radar charts are inherently geometric, making them both a perfect fit and fun to make with CSS, thanks to the `polygon()` function. Read along as Preethi Sam demonstrates the process and sprinkles it with a pinch of JavaScript to make a handy, reusable component.
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Frequently Heard In My Beginning Front-End Web Development Class
What could we learn from entry-level students in front-end web development? As seasoned professionals, you might think you’ve seen it all, but the truth is that the newcomers are asking the most intriguing questions and making connections that those of us who have spent years on the front end may have never considered.
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Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, And It May Be Our Fault
An overwhelming number of frameworks and tooling available today gives the impression that web development has gotten perhaps too complex. Juan Diego Rodríguez explores if web development really is that complex and, most importantly, how we can prevent it from getting even more difficult than we already perceive it to be.
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A Guide To Designing For Older Adults
With one billion people aged 60 or older worldwide, inclusivity is more important than ever. Learn how to create digital experiences that empower independence and competence for older adults while enhancing usability for all. An upcoming part of Smart Interface Design Patterns.
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When Words Cannot Describe: Designing For AI Beyond Conversational Interfaces
As Artificial Intelligence evolves the computing paradigm, designers have an opportunity to craft more intuitive user interfaces. Maximillian Piras examines how the latest AI capabilities can reshape the future of human-computer interaction beyond conversation alone.
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29 Days Of Inspiration (February 2024 Wallpapers Edition)
With February just around the corner, how about a little inspiration boost? We might have one for you: desktop wallpapers created with love by the community for the community. Enjoy!
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The Feature Trap: Why Feature Centricity Is Harming Your Product
Most product teams commonly adopt a feature-centric mindset, finding them convenient for brainstorming, drafting requirement documents, and integrating into backlogs and ticketing systems. In this article, Andy Budd shows how fixation with features might be holding you back and how making a few small tweaks to your process could make an entire world of difference.
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A Simple Guide To Retrieval Augmented Generation Language Models
Language models have shown impressive capabilities. But that doesn’t mean they’re without faults, as anyone who has witnessed a ChatGPT “hallucination” can attest. In this article, Joas Pambou diagnoses the symptoms that cause hallucinations and explains not only what RAG is but also different approaches for using it to solve language model limitations.
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CSS Blurry Shimmer Effect
Taking inspiration from shadows, author Yair Even Or creates the same sort of thing, only with a blurring effect in place of the shadow. Read along for a step-by-step explanation of how it comes together using a combination of masks, gradients, and the good ol’ `backdrop-filter` property.
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The AI Dilemma In Graphic Design: Steering Towards Excellence In Typography And Beyond
AI promises a major upheaval in typography, with designers finding themselves navigating both opportunities and challenges. How will it impact quality, design roles, and our use of type in the future? As we explore this new frontier, we realise that we are at a juncture as significant as Gutenberg’s press, set to redefine how we interact with text and visual communication.
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The Complex But Awesome CSS border-image Property
The CSS `border-image` property is one of those properties you undoubtedly know exists but may not have ever reached for. In this article, Temani Afif demonstrates different approaches for using `border-image` to create clever decorative accents and shapes.
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Top Front-End Tools Of 2023
Useful front-end tools for CSS and JavaScript developers that were most popular last year and will help you speed up your development workflow. Let’s dive in!
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SolidStart: A Different Breed Of Meta-Framework
Are you ready for a little exercise of pulling a framework apart and putting the pieces back together? In this article, Atila Fassina explains how meta-frameworks have evolved around core libraries in their own unique ways.
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The View Transitions API And Delightful UI Animations (Part 2)
The View Transitions API is a new — but game-changing — feature that allows us to do the types of reactive state-based UI and page transitions that have traditionally been exclusive to JavaScript frameworks. In the second half of this mini two-part series, Adrian Bece expands on the demos from the first article to demonstrate how the View Transitions API can be used to transition not just elements between two states but the transition between full views and pages in single-page and multi-page applications.
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The Magic Of New Beginnings (January 2024 Wallpapers Edition)
Let’s start into the new year with a little inspiration boost: wallpapers created with love by the community for the community. Happy 2024!
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Making Sense Of “Senseless” JavaScript Features
JavaScript may be the most popular client-side language in the world, but it’s far from perfect and not without its quirks. Juan Diego Rodriguez examines several “absurd” JavaScript eccentricities and explains how they made it into the language as well as how to avoid them in your own code.
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The View Transitions API And Delightful UI Animations (Part 1)
The View Transitions API is a new — but game-changing — feature that allows us to do the types of reactive state-based UI and page transitions that have traditionally been exclusive to JavaScript frameworks. In the first part of this mini two-part series, Adrian Bece thoroughly explains why we need the API and demonstrates its basic usage.
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New CSS Viewport Units Do Not Solve The Classic Scrollbar Problem
Since the introduction of CSS viewport units in 2012, many of us have been using `width: 100vw` as a way to set an element’s width to the full width of the viewport. But, as Šime Vidas explains in this deep dive, `100vw` does not always represent the full width of the viewport due to differences in how browsers handle scrollbars.
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Building Components For Consumption, Not Complexity (Part 2)
Part 2 concentrates on the key points from Luis’ framework and practical tips about managing a design system that should be both robust and easy to adopt.
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CSS Scroll Snapping Aligned With Global Page Layout: A Full-Width Slider Case Study
Have you run into a situation where you need the padding of one element to align with the padding of another element? In this article, Brecht De Ruyte demonstrates the issue with a full-width slider component that breaks out of the main page container and shares a couple of techniques to keep it visually aligned with other elements on the page.
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Building Components For Consumption, Not Complexity (Part 1)
Design systems can be of immense help, but failure to adopt them invalidates the hard work that goes into building the thing in the first place! In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls.
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Preparing For Interaction To Next Paint, A New Web Core Vital
Starting in March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint will formally replace First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital metric. Learn how the two metrics differ, why we needed a new way to measure interaction responsiveness, and how you can start optimizing the performance of your site now for a seamless transition to the latest Core Web Vital metric.
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Five-Second Testing: Taking A Closer Look At First Impressions (Case Study)
Five-second testing is a popular method of usability research used in the industry, yet in essence, its core belief boils down to virtually a superstition. Eduard Kuric looks under the hood at how first impressions are affected by various factors and how UX researchers and product owners can ensure that the user’s first steps can get off on the right foot.
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How Marketing Changed OOP In JavaScript
Discussing the decisions surrounding JavaScript prototypes, the article by Juan Diego Rodriguez scrutinizes their origin, examines missteps in the design, and explores how these factors have affected the way we write JavaScript today.
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Recovering Deleted Files From Your Git Working Tree
Git is designed to assure us that we can track a project’s files at different points in time. But it doesn’t assure us that those files are always safe along the way. For those of you who have dealt with the sinking feeling that you’ve irrevocably deleted and lost files, Sanmi has a couple of approaches that, in the right situations, may help bring them back.
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Cold Days, Shining Lights (December 2023 Wallpapers Edition)
Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a collection of desktop wallpapers? We’ve got some eye-catching designs to sweeten up the last few weeks of the year and, if you’re celebrating, to get you in the holiday mood.