September 6, 2019 — Smashing Magazine is thirteen years old! The web has changed a lot since Vitaly posted his first article back in 2006. The team at Smashing has changed too, as have the things that we bring to our community. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to share the stories of some of our Smashing Team. The people behind the magazine, books, and conferences. Read more…

September 5, 2019 — In this fourth instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you about Alexey Brodovitch, one of the most influential art directors of the twentieth century. Andy will teach you about Brodovitch’s iconic work and show you how to apply some of his design techniques to the work you make for the web. In this article, you’ll learn how scattering images will fill your designs with movement. Andy will teach you how to mirror pictures and text, and how to carve text into shapes using CSS Shapes. Read more…

September 4, 2019 — In this article, Rachel Andrew explores the situations in which you might encounter overflow in your web designs and explains how CSS has evolved to create better ways to manage and design around unknown amounts of content. Rachel will show you how new layout methods and new values in CSS can help us to deal with overflow and create less fragile designs. She’ll also explain one of the fundamental concepts behind the design of CSS — that of avoiding data loss. Read more…

September 3, 2019 — The typical website stack has gotten complex, involving many tools and technologies, and requiring automation to handle its deployment adequately. By automating all the tasks to execute, you will not dread doing the deployment, indeed you may not be even aware of it. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will take a closer look at Buddy, one of the most comprehensive tools for automating website deployments. Read more…

September 2, 2019 — Switching tools isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. In this article, Buzz Usborne brings you a nuts-and-bolts and behind-the-scenes look at how Help Scout migrated design systems from Sketch to Figma — why we made the switch, a step-by-step walkthrough of what it entailed, and what we got out of it — a story that applies to any team considering a large-scale tool migration. Read more…

August 31, 2019 — Let’s welcome September with a fresh desktop wallpaper. Designed by artists and designers from across the globe and available with and without a calendar. As a bonus goodie, we also collected some timeless favorites from past years’ editions at the end of this post. Please note that all images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper. We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. A big thank-you to all the artists who have submitted their wallpapers and are still diligently continuing to do so. Happy September! Read more…

August 30, 2019 — In any project that requires any user interaction, there is one critical factor that makes the difference between success and failure: good documentation. This holds true regardless of how small or large your project is. One of the most overlooked aspects of creating and/or maintaining any software library is good documentation. Luckily for you, a new tool on the market is here to make it easy for you to create great documentation for your projects. Whether you like it or not, you will never hear from users who give up after being unable to solve their problem due to inadequate documentation. Read more…

August 29, 2019 — Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. We need to adjust how we build and design our websites. Is there something to learn from app design and tap bars? Can we fix the mobile navigation of our websites to have a lower interaction cost? In this article, Arturas Leonovas will find out. Read more…

August 28, 2019 — You’ve probably heard of WebAssembly and why it’s a powerful tool in the browser. In this article, Robert Aboukhalil will explore why serverless WebAssembly might be equally powerful outside the browser, and how to get started using it. Certain types of applications — such as data analysis and image processing, to name a few — can greatly benefit from such an approach. Though the runtime suffers because of the additional round-trips to the network, this approach does allow us to process more data at a time and not put a drain on users’ resources. Read more…

August 27, 2019 — Philippe Hong has made the switch to Figma almost two years ago and he has no regrets so far. In one of his previous blog posts on the topic, he made an in-depth review of Figma, and he’s glad he could help other designers make the switch In this article, let’s take a closer look at what Figma really has to offer. Here are 20 tips on how to work faster and better with this well-known and collaborative interface design tool. Read more…