1,379 articles from Smashing Magazine.
“Intuitive design” is one of those overused phrases that we as designers hear all too often from stakeholders and their requirements. In this article, Carrie Webster explores what intuitive design actually means, why it doesn’t make sense, how we can better approach design solutions, and what the future of interfaces might look like. It is aimed at user experience designers and anyone interested e
Coding thousands of pieces of artwork teaches you a thing or two about the creative process. Whether you want to overcome perfectionism, learn new skills, or simply explore the playful side of coding, regular projects may be just what you need. In this article, Saskia Freeke will share her thoughts and experience. We hope to yield the inspiration you need to start similar projects of your own.
In modern development, there are so many great tools for developing websites, but often they are more than what’s necessary for a given project. Because these tools are built for diverse use cases, they have to have a lot of features. Those features make them powerful. They also make them quite complex and opaque for new developers. In this article, Bryan Robinson will explore how to take a humble
All pages of a Shopify online store can adopt CSS Grid, but one obvious touchpoint of any e-commerce site that can benefit from a robust and clean grid layout is the collection page. In this article, Liam Griffin will be looking at how to set up a grid layout for products on your collection pages, and how to use Shopify’s section settings to create customizable options in the online store editor.
We’re talking about RedwoodJS. What exactly does it mean to be a full-stack Jamstack framework? Drew McLellan talks to community champion Anthony Campolo to find out.
Building positive relationships with your clients is the secret ingredient to delivering better work, earning more money, and creating lasting partnerships. In this article, Matt Saunders is going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped him to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help y
There’s a lot of information out there — that’s a fact. In these monthly editions, Smashing’s senior editor Iris brings it all in one place because we know how hard it can be to stay on top of things. So with no further ado, here’s what was, what is, and what will be!
Among others, [Next.js](https://nextjs.org) has dubbed itself: *The React Framework for Static Websites*. But just like every other framework whose goal is to help you build what matters by abstracting common, redundant tasks, you’re often required to learn something new and opinionated. With Next.js, one of the things you need to know is how to integrate different CSS methods with its API, and th
In this article, we will take a closer look at GraphQL and how we can integrate it into a Gatsby website by building and implementing advanced data sourcing and transformation in Gatsby.
We must effectively design to gain and hold users’ attention in order to have them use our digital products. In this article, Victor Yocco covers specific tactics with supporting research that are bound to help you design for attention. He also discusses the need to understand why we want to gain users’ attention as well as what our users’ needs are.
GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is a set JavaScript functions that let you tween a value/attribute/CSS property over time and insert these tweens into a timeline for more complex animations. In this article, Blessing explains how GSAP plays well with the React library by integrating its functions into a React component in building an example landing page with a variety of animations.
This week we celebrate the 14th birthday of Smashing Magazine. We didn’t quite have the year that we planned though! I took a look back at some memories from this year and previous years — with the help of the team and some Smashing friends.
Being able to run Google’s Lighthouse analysis suite programmatically provides a lot of advantages, especially for larger or more complex web applications. Using Lighthouse programmatically allows engineers to set up quality monitoring for sites that need more customization than straightforward applications of Lighthouse (such as Lighthouse CI) allow. This article contains a brief introduction to
Choosing what CMS to use in your next development project is a critical decision for any business, large or small. In this guide, Jonathan Kelley is going to run through the potential of Craft CMS, setting up a local environment and creating a basic cat blog with an API endpoint to accompany it. It’s a perfect jumping off point for anyone looking to expand from their current CMS system, or make th
In this guide, Ibrahima Ndaw will be looking at Next.js, a popular React framework that offers a great developer experience and ships with all of the features you need for production. We will also build a blog, step by step, using Next.js and MDX. Finally, we’ll cover why you would opt for Next.js instead of “vanilla” React and alternatives such as Gatsby.
Thanks to the wide support of the prefers-reduced-motion-media feature, we now have more advanced ways to design motion that can be creative and innovative while also being safer for those with motion sensitivities.
We’re talking about SVG Animation. How can vector images, JavaScript and CSS all work together to provide engaging motion graphics? Drew McLellan talks to SVG expert Cassie Evans to find out.
Meet our Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklist Cards, a deck of 100 cards with questions to ask when designing and building any interface component — carousel, hamburger, table, date picker, autocomplete, slider, onboarding, pricing plans, authentication, web forms and many others. Check the preview (PDF) and jump to description ↓
Postman allows you to manually test your APIs in both its desktop and web-based applications. However, it also has the ability for you to automate these tests by writing JavaScript assertions on your API endpoints. In this article, Kelvin Omereshone will learn how to write automated tests on web APIs with Postman. In order to follow along to this tutorial, you’ll need at least a fair amount of fam
A component library helps to keep a design consistent across multiple projects. It ensures consistency because any changes made will propagate across the projects that make use of it. In this tutorial, Ademola Adegbuyi will show you how to build a component library, using Emotion in React to resolve inconsistencies. At the end of this piece, you should be able to create a component library that fi
Icons have long held an important place in the design of mobile apps. But beyond using them to create larger and more attractive touch targets, there are other ways mobile app designers can use these tiny elements to make an app more engaging. This post will explore four ways to do this. Today, Suzanna Scacca will look at a number of ways you can creatively add icons or icon-like elements to your
Figma is a design tool that is rapidly gaining popularity and becoming more common in companies around the world. Unlike most design software, Figma is free and browser-based so developers can easily access the full design files making the developer handoff process significantly smoother. With article, Jurn van Wissen teaches developers who have nothing but a basic understanding of design tools ev
In this article, Abdulazeez Adeshina will show you what storybook is about and how to use it to build and test React components by building a simple application. He’ll start with a basic example that shows how to work with storybook, then will go ahead to create a storybook for a Table component which will hold students’ data. You should have basic knowledge of React and the use of NPM before proc
Vue Router is the official router for Vue that is mostly used for creating multiple pages living on different routes (`/home`, `/profile`) in your application but has some features that some people do not know about. In this tutorial, Timi Omoyeni is going to show you some amazing features the Vue Router has and how we can make use of them in our app. You can find all the code used in this article
New month, new wallpapers! In this post, Cosima Mielke brings you wallpaper designs for September 2020, created with love by the design community for the community. All of them are available in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. A big thank-you to everyone who shared their artworks with us — we sincerely appreciate it!
In this article, Precious Ndubueze will be taking an in-depth look at what Django brings to the table by understanding what the generated files and folder do, this will give us a better understanding of the Django framework. It’s important to know that it will not be possible to take a look at everything happening inside of Django. For cases outside the scope of this tutorial, there will be links
The SmashingConf team had such fun at their first SmashingConf Live! event last week. In this post, editor-in-chief Rachel Andrew shares highlights and feedback from the online conference.
Nowadays whether you’re consuming or sharing content on the web, it is likely to be via a big website. Twitter, Youtube, or a Facebook-owned service are popular examples. Whilst this gives us the advantage of being able to participate in a larger conversation at almost no monetary cost, there is also the downside of potentially losing all our content if a company closes, as has happened in the pas
MobX is a battle-tested library that makes state management simple and scalable by transparently applying functional reactive programming. It treats your application like a spreadsheet, and it’s one of the many state management tools available to React developers. In this tutorial, Fortune Ikechi is going to show you how to use MobX to manage state in React Native applications by building a React
Customer needs should be one of the primary considerations when designing a website or landing page. The era of customer-centric landing pages has dawned. And if your job involves being concerned with metrics like conversion, engagement, and bounce-rates, this is a post that you may want to sit straight up for. In this article, Travis Jamison explains why customer-centricity is so important and ho
We’re talking about Next.js. What is it, and where might it fit into our web development workflow? Drew McLellan talks to co-creator Guillermo Rauch to find out.
Ever wanted to have a comments section for your blog, but were overwhelmed by the high cost and maintenance solutions? Firebase can be your savior. In this guide, Aman Thakur will show you how to add a comments section to your blog with Firebase, while learning the basics of Firebase on the way. Let’s build a super-simple comments section.
A website earns a backlink whenever another website links to it. But there’s a big difference between a backlink and a high-authority backlink. If an authoritative website links to yours, it can significantly boost your ranking in Google search. And this is why backlinks are so highly sought after in marketing… and why web designers should have this on their radar as they design websites for clien
Ionic Framework provides first-class support for building fast and mobile-optimized applications for any platform using React. In this tutorial, Jerry Navi will show you how to build forms using Ionic React’s UI input components in this tutorial. You will also learn how to use a library to help with detecting form input changes and responding to validation rules. Finally, you will learn to make yo
Flask makes it possible for developers to build an API for whatever use case they might have. In this tutorial, Wole Oyekanmi will show you how to set up Google Cloud, Cloud SQL, and App Engine to build a Flask API. (Cloud SQL is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database engine, and App Engine is a fully managed PaaS for hosting applications.)
After 12 inspiring articles, Andy Clarke draws his Inspired Design Decisions series to a close by explaining how studying the work of Bradbury Thompson — one of the masters of 20th Century graphic — will teach you how to combine graphic and typographical elements with innovative layouts to create stunning designs for the web. In this final article, Andy brings together lessons from all his previou
Props and PropTypes are an important mechanism for passing information between React components, and we’re going to look into them in great detail here. This tutorial will introduce you to the details about props, passing and accessing props, and passing information to any component using props. However, it’s always a good practice to validate the data we are getting through props by using PropTyp
Alongside our guides, printed books, eBooks and printed magazine, we’re thrilled to have yet another addition to our smashingly cherished gems: meet our brand new [Interface Design Patterns Checklists](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/08/checklist-cards-release/). Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, Vitaly Friedman, has been collecting, curating and refining each checklist for years — we’re conv
SEO is an ever-changing world. Blink and you’ll miss the latest best practices, thought leaders, and tools. Feeling out of touch is natural. Every tweak to major search engine algorithms sends shockwaves throughout the web. For those who don’t follow the SEO space it can be easy to lose track of the latest trends, authorities, and resources. That’s what this page is for. It will break down SEO’s h
In this article, Umar Hansa will demonstrate some useful features in DevTools which can help you improve the accessibility of your website. For many websites, things like performance and accessibility are an afterthought. But as web developers, it’s best to strive to create the best possible experience we can for our users, regardless of their abilities. This article uses Google Chrome since it’s
The first place Suzanne Scacca goes to whenever she’s curious about what more could be done to improve our users experiences is the Google Developers site or Think with Google to pull the latest consumer data. There’s a reason why Google dominates market share for things like search engines, web browsers, email clients and cloud storage services. It knows exactly what consumers want and it has des
Splitting colors into three levels (palette, functional, and component) can help you be more adaptive to changes and new requirements while working on a project. In this article, Artur Basak introduces a modern approach on how to set up CSS Custom Properties that respond to the application colors. The idea of dividing colors into three levels can be quite useful: a palette (or scheme), functional
We’re talking about Serverless architectures. What does that mean, and how does it differ from how we might build sites currently? Drew McLellan talks to Chris Coyier to find out.
You can get by in NodeJS without properly handling errors but due to the asynchronous nature of NodeJS, improper handling or errors can cause you pain soon enough. This article is for JavaScript and NodeJS developers who want to improve error-handling in their applications. Kelvin Omereshone explains the `error` class pattern and how to use it for a better, more efficient way of handling errors ac
This is the third and final part of the tutorial in which we’ll create the wheels (rims and tires), and add all the final touches (including the racing decals on the car’s body).
Showcasing new product features to users or familiarizing them with some UI functionality in a web app can get tedious, especially when you want users to see a lot of things. In the following guide, BLessing Krofegha will show you how to proactively use product tours to onboard users into a new and complex UX, and how to familiarize them with UI functionality without boring them, using a typical R
You might be wondering, “Why should I use this instead of the alternatives?” Sapper is based on Svelte, which is known for its speed and relatively small bundle size. In a world where performance plays a huge role in determining an effective user experience, we want to optimize for that. In this article, Daniel Madalitso Phiri will take you through how to build a Svelte-powered static blog with Sa
Imagine if your website could evoke this kind of response. Visitors who respond to the sensory stimulation would instantly be in a more positive headspace, which they’d then associate with the site and your brand. While you don’t want to design a website for all five senses — because that would most certainly lead to sensory overload — you can use individual senses to strengthen the experience vis
Redux is a robust state-management library for single-page JavaScript apps. It is described on the official documentation as a predictable state container for Javascript applications and it’s fairly simple to learn the concepts and implement Redux in a simple app. Going from a simple counter app to a real-world app, however, can be quite the jump.
This tutorial is for illustrators who also happen to be passionate car enthusiasts. If you follow me along, you will learn how to draw from scratch in Sketch the legendary Porsche 911, all in vectors. Together, we will be pushing Sketch to its limits and you will learn how to create an almost photo realistic car by using basic shapes, layer styles, and various Sketch features. No bitmap images wil
Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of wallpapers is for you. In this post, Cosima Mielke brings you wallpapers for August 2020. All of them are available in versions with and without a calendar — to help you count down the days to a big deadline (or a few days off, maybe?) or continue to use your favorite even after the month has ended. You decide. A big thank-you to
Just like during the Renaissance, we’re living in times of incredible cultural and artistic innovation. As the Internet evolves, browsers align, capabilities are added and accessibility of technology becomes easier, designers face new opportunities to create, think, and change their status with no-code tools. In this article, Uri Paz presents some tools that allow non-programmers to create applica
Ever tried interacting with a GraphQL server in a client-side application and felt like giving up even before getting anywhere? Ever declined an invitation to join a code base that requires working with GraphQL API because you had no idea? Ever felt like the only front-end engineer who hasn’t learned how to consume GraphQL APIs? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this tutorial is
Emmett McBain was a Black American graphic designer whose work had a remarkable impact on the representation of Black Americans in advertising. He co-founded what became the biggest Black-owned agency in the USA. McBain designed almost 75 record covers by the time he was 24, and in the penultimate of his Inspired Design Decisions series, Andy Clarke will explain how his work can inspire what we de
We’re asking if modern best practices are bad for the web? Are modern frameworks taking us down the wrong path? Drew McLellan speaks to Lean Web expert Chris Ferdinandi to find out.
With Angular Material and ng2-charts, you can take advantage of schematics to cut down the effort and time you may spend building a dashboard. Schematics in Angular 9 are code generators that can create components and patterns in projects using predetermined templates and layouts. In this article, Zara Cooper explains how to take advantage of schematics in Angular Material and ng2-charts to substa
This tutorial is for illustrators who also happen to be passionate car enthusiasts. If you follow along, you will learn how to draw from scratch in Sketch the legendary Porsche 911 — all in vectors.
Styled components are “visual primitives for components”, and their goal is to give us a flexible way to style components. The result is a tight coupling between components and their styles. While the component-driven approach has ushered in a new frontier in the way we build web applications, it isn’t without its imperfections — one being its usability and scalability with CSS. This has given bir
Which aspects should we take into consideration when designing and developing for reading? How can we create accessible, comfortable, inclusive experiences for all readers, including the most challenged and those affected by dyslexia? In this article, Edoardo Cavazza will cover how we can improve websites legibility using some modern CSS techniques, great new technologies like variable fonts and p
Electron is an open-source software framework developed and maintained by GitHub. It allows for the development of desktop GUI applications using web technologies. In this tutorial, Timi Omoyeni explains what you need to keep in mind when building a desktop application with Vue.js using the [Vue CLI Plugin Electron Builder](https://nklayman.github.io/vue-cli-plugin-electron-builder/).
