Top Design News
07. Dezember 2025
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Beyond The Black Box: Practical XAI For UX Practitioners
Explainable AI isn’t just a challenge for data scientists. It’s also a design challenge and a core pillar of trustworthy, effective AI products. Victor Yocco offers practical guidance and design patterns for building explainability into real products.
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Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore
CSS Masonry is almost here! Patrick Brosset takes a deep dive into what this long-awaited feature means for web developers and how you could make use of it in your own work.
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A Sparkle Of December Magic (2025 Wallpapers Edition)
With December just around the corner, how about some new desktop wallpapers to welcome the last month of the year — and the holiday season, if you’re celebrating? Our latest edition of monthly wallpapers has got you covered. Enjoy!
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The Accessibility Problem With Authentication Methods Like CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs were meant to keep bots out, but too often, they lock people with disabilities out, too. From image classification to click-based tests, many “human checks” are anything but inclusive. There’s no universal solution, but understanding real user needs is where accessibility truly starts.
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Design System Culture: What It Is And Why It Matters (Excerpt)
We’re so happy to announce that “Maturing Design Systems”—a Smashing book by Ben Callahan — will soon be joining the Smashing Library! Ben’s insights and advice are so powerful, we thought you might like to read an excerpt from the book. Subscribe to our Smashing newsletter to be notified when orders are open.
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Designing For Stress And Emergency
Practical guidelines on designing time-critical products that prevent errors and improve accuracy. Part of the Measure UX & Design Impact (use the code 🎟
IMPACTto save 20% off today). With a live UX training starting next week. -
Keyframes Tokens: Standardizing Animation Across Projects
Animations can be one of the most joyful parts of building interfaces, but without structure, they can also become one of the biggest sources of frustration. By consolidating and standardizing keyframes, you take something that is usually messy and hard to manage and turn it into a clear, predictable system.
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From Chaos To Clarity: Simplifying Server Management With AI And Automation
Server chaos doesn’t have to be the norm. AI-ready infrastructure and automation can bring clarity, performance, and focus back to your web work.
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CSS Gamepad API Visual Debugging With CSS Layers
Debugging controllers can be a real pain. Here’s a deep dive into how CSS helps clean it up and how to build a reusable visual debugger for your own projects.
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Older Tech In The Browser Stack
There are many existing web features and technologies in the wild that you may never touch directly in your day-to-day work. Perhaps you’re fairly new to web development and are simply unaware of them because you’re steeped in the abstraction of a specific framework that doesn’t require you to know it deeply, or even at all. Bryan Rasmussen looks specifically at XPath and demonstrates how it can be used alongside CSS to query elements.
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Effectively Monitoring Web Performance
There are lots of tips for [improving your website performance](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/improve-website-performance?utm_campaign=sm-10). But even if you follow all of the advice, are you able to maintain an optimized site? And are you targeting the right pages? Matt Zeunert outlines an effective strategy for web performance optimization and explains the roles that different types of data play in it.
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Smashing Animations Part 6: Magnificent SVGs With `` And CSS Custom Properties
SVG is one of those web technologies that’s both elegant and, at times, infuriating. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke explains his technique for animating SVG elements that are hidden in the Shadow DOM.
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Six Key Components of UX Strategy
Let’s dive into the building blocks of UX strategy and see how it speaks the language of product and business strategy to create user value while achieving company goals. Part of the Measure UX & Design Impact (use the code 🎟
IMPACTto save 20% off today). -
How To Leverage Component Variants In Penpot
With component variants, design systems become more flexible, letting you reuse the same component while adapting its look or state with ease. In this article, Daniel Schwarz demonstrates how design tokens can be leveraged to manage components and their variations using Penpot, the open-source tool built for scalable, consistent design.
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Fading Light And Falling Leaves (November 2025 Wallpapers Edition)
The new month is just around the corner, and that means: It’s time for some new desktop wallpapers! All of them are designed by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!
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JavaScript For Everyone: Iterators
Here is a lesson on Iterators. Iterables implement the iterable iteration interface, and iterators implement the iterator iteration interface. Sounds confusing? Mat breaks it all down in the article.
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Ambient Animations In Web Design: Practical Applications (Part 2)
Motion can be tricky: too much distracts, too little feels flat. Ambient animations sit in the middle. They’re subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In part two of his series, web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows how ambient animations can add personality to any website design.
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AI In UX: Achieve More With Less
A simple but powerful mental model for working with AI: treat it like an enthusiastic intern with no real-world experience. Paul Boag shares lessons learned from real client projects across user research, design, development, and content creation.
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How To Make Your UX Research Hard To Ignore
Research isn’t everything. Facts alone don’t win arguments, but powerful stories do. Here’s how to turn your research into narratives that inspire trust and influence decisions.
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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?






