Inside the Smashing Kitchen
Keeping up with the web industry means tracking both slow-moving specifications and the fast-paced ideas that surround them. Every week brings hundreds of new articles and blog posts, far too many for any one person to read. The Smashing Podcast exists to cover that gap, running bi-weekly episodes that touch on a range of subjects for different skill levels. Hosts Drew McLellan and Bethany Andrew keep the conversations sharp and informative.
- Previous episodes (including transcripts)
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A New Title on the Shelf
Smashing Books is welcoming a new addition with The Ethical Design Handbook, a practical guide to designing digital products that respect user choices and are built with ethics at their core. The book offers concrete guidelines for making ethical decisions that lead to sustainable business growth. Printed hardcover copies are scheduled to ship in the first two weeks of March, with a pre-release discount still available before the official launch.
The full table of contents is available for a closer look, and pre-orders are open now.
SmashingConf Austin: Meet the Speakers
SmashingConf events aim to be open settings where front-end developers and designers can attend live sessions, join workshops, and ask speakers anything from debugging strategies to naming conventions. For the upcoming Austin event, three speakers shared what they're bringing to the stage:
- Miriam Suzanne will cover new CSS techniques and the possibilities they unlock.
- Zach Leatherman takes on web font performance tooling, type, and general workflow.
- Rémi Parmentier explores what can be achieved with HTML email today, covering common techniques and the current state of things in that unconventional world.
Interviews with each speaker are linked above for a closer look at their backgrounds and talk previews.
Video Performance Webinar
Doug Sillars will present a Smashing TV webinar on optimizing video files for fast playback, scheduled for Feb. 25 at 17:00 London time. He'll share scenarios for making video delivery more efficient on the web.
Illustrations for our publications come from Ricardo Gimenes.
Popular Articles This Week
Several recent features on Smashing Magazine have drawn particular attention from readers:
- "How To Create Maps With React And Leaflet" by Shajia Abidi — A tutorial on building advanced maps by combining React and Vanilla JS with the Leaflet library.
- "Understanding CSS Grid: Grid Template Areas" by Rachel Andrew — The first in a new series unpacking the CSS Grid Layout specification, focused on the
grid-template-areasproperty for item placement. - "How To Create A Headless WordPress Site On The JAMstack" by Sarah Drasner and Geoff Graham — A starter template plus tutorial on connecting WordPress as a headless CMS with a Vue/Nuxt front end via the WordPress API.
- "Magic Flip Cards: Solving A Common Sizing Problem" by Dan Halliday — A look at the standard animated flip card approach alongside an alternative method that resolves the sizing issue.
Useful Tools and Guides From the Front-End Community
Beyond the conference stage, the web community keeps producing genuinely useful resources. Here are some standouts worth keeping close at hand, from color palettes and Git tricks to a whimsical take on Kubernetes.
Tiny Helpers: One-Stop Tool Discovery
Every developer hits the moment when a quick task needs a ready-made utility, whether it is minifying an SVG or pulling CSS out of HTML. Tiny Helpers, maintained by Stefan Judis, collects free, single-purpose online tools for web developers. The catalog spans APIs, accessibility, color, fonts, performance, regular expressions, SVG, and Unicode — and it stays current thanks to pull-request submissions from the community.
Happy Hues: See Palettes in Action
Finding a color palette is easy; knowing how to apply it is the harder part. Happy Hues, designed by Mackenzie Child, offers palette inspiration while doubling as a live example. Switching a palette instantly restyles the site itself, showing exactly how the colors behave in a genuine design layout rather than leaving you to imagine it.
Nielsen's Heuristics, as Cavern Posters
Jakob Nielsen first published his 10 usability heuristics in 1994, and they remain a checklist for interface designers today. Agente Studio turned each principle into a dedicated poster, with every one illustrating and explaining the heuristic in question. The posters carry a CC license and are available as JPEG and EPS files, freely downloadable after sharing the page on social media.
Pushing Back Against Online Tracking
It is no secret that data about us is collected, shared, and sometimes sold. Tim Herrera's New York Times piece dives into the company behind our data, the "secret scores" built from it, and unsettling third-party reports that surface details as intimate as delivery orders and Airbnb messages. More practically, it points toward tools and tips for opting out of advertiser tracking altogether.
Phippy Learns Kubernetes
Explaining Kubernetes to someone outside the field usually invokes a lot of hand-waving. "The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes" takes a different route. As an online storybook or PDF, it follows Phippy, a PHP app who yearns for her own environment and webserver, until Captain Kube offers her a home aboard his ship. The metaphor remains faithful enough to the underlying concepts to be genuinely instructive.
Flow Lines Generator for Custom Visuals
A signature visual touch helps a site stand out. The Flow Lines Generator creates random geometric flow lines, with adjustable formulas and spacing between shapes, exportable as SVG. Using a unique generated pattern per page could serve as exactly the distinctive visual element larger sites lack.
Leveling Up Git Skills
Whether you live in the terminal or rely on a visual client, deeper Git knowledge pays off. Mike Riethmueller's guide runs from configuration and aliases to staging, merge conflicts, stashing, and advanced tips. For those who want to push further, Harry Roberts covers personal Git habits, Atlassian provides advanced tutorial material, Bruno Passos lists useful commands, and GitHub publishes an official cheat sheet PDF.
A Trip Through the Museum of Obsolete Media
Every storage and playback format eventually succumbs to the next one. Jason Curtis catalogues these artifacts in the Museum of Obsolete Media, collecting everything from familiar cassettes and floppy disks to more obscure formats like the "carte de visite", "Gould Moulded Records", and "Magnabelt", with entries reaching back to the mid-19th century.
The Smashing Newsletter is curated manually, with no third-party mailings or hidden promotions. Reading lists and tools like these arrive once a week, accompanied by checklists and guides from Vitaly.
