January 8, 2020 — No frills, or flashing neon frills with sprinklers attached? ‘Brutalist’ websites have flourished in recent years, but their guiding philosophy remains unclear. Brutalist web design has grown so quickly that there does not seem to be a clear consensus on what the style actually is. To some it means practicality, to others audacity. Love it or hate it, brutalist architecture celebrates rawness. Read more…

January 7, 2020 — Browsers’ visual display of headings nested inside <section> elements makes it look as if they are assigning a logical hierarchy to those headings. However, this is purely visual and is not communicated to assistive technologies. In this article, Bruce Lawson explains what use we have of <section> and how authors should mark up headings that are hugely important to AT users. Read more…

January 6, 2020 — Let’s make 2020… fast! An annual front-end performance checklist (PDF/Apple Pages/MS Word), with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today. Updated since 2016. Kindly supported by our dear friends at LogRocket, a frontend performance monitoring solution that helps reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. Read more…

January 3, 2020 — In a new series, Rachel Andrew breaks down the CSS Grid Layout specification. This time, we take a detailed look at what happens when you create a grid container and the various properties that can be applied to the container to shape your grid. Read more…

January 2, 2020 — Are you using sticky elements on your mobile website or PWA? If so, take a moment and ask yourself this question: Do you have anything in them besides your logo, hamburger menu or search bar? If that’s not the case, then it’s time to shake things up. Your mobile visitors are primed to take action. You just need to make it easy for them to do so — and sticky bars and elements are the perfect opportunity to do that. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you some creative uses for sticky elements in mobile design, so you can help more of your visitors to take action. Read more…

December 31, 2019 — The Smashing Team looks back at 2019. It’s been a busy year with new team members, four conferences, two books, a print magazine, and many, many articles. In this annual round-up, Rachel Anderw will share some of her thoughts and those of some of the Smashing team, as we look back on the past year as well as look forward to 2020. Read more…

December 31, 2019 — Happy 2020! Let’s welcome the new year with wallpapers created by the community for the community. Available with and without a calendar for January, they’ll help guide you through your first adventures of 2020. Read more…

December 31, 2019 — In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about micro-frontends. What is a micro-frontend and how is that different from the sort of approach we might be taking at the moment? We find out from micro-frontend pioneer, Luca Mezzalira. Read more…

December 30, 2019 — Have you ever looked at the design techniques and elements you use to build mobile apps and evaluated whether or not they’re still useful or relevant? If you haven’t done this in a while (or ever), stop what you’re doing and read this. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at the 5 things mobile app designers should stop doing so they can create more streamlined and positive user experiences. Read more…

December 27, 2019 — The CSS contain property gives you a way to explain your layout to the browser, so performance optimizations can be made. However, it does come with some side effects in terms of your layout. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to introduce a CSS Specification that has just become a W3C Recommendation. The CSS Containment Specification defines a single property, contain, and it can help you to explain to the browser which parts of your layout are independent and will not need recalculating if some other part of the layout changes. Read more…