July 15, 2015 — Quantity queries and quantity ordering are advanced concepts and might be scary for beginners. However, as we move presentational styling away from programming languages and into CSS, we should use these tools more and more. Even as many members of our industry explore content queries, we can now use quantity queries to modify the order of content simply by counting. If you had to create a table of items, you might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone? Read more…

July 13, 2015 — Now is a great time to start a podcast. It’s an authentic and intimate way to demonstrate authority in your niche and to grow your client base. Kyle Racki recently started his first podcast, Agencies Drinking Beer, with his cofounder, Kevin Springer. When starting out, he was a bit lost with the technical logistics of actually setting up the podcast. Here is all of the best advice, information and resources Kyle can offer you. This way, you can spend less time on the technical side of setting up your podcast and more time creating killer content. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to regularly deliver new content, but the reward is more than worth the effort. Ready to start? Let’s go! Read more…

July 11, 2015 — As developers, we know how important it is to sharpen our tools and continually add new ones to our workflow. The command line is one of the best tools you can master as a developer. With tools like Grunt, Gulp and Bower leveraging the increase in productivity that comes with working in the command line, we are seeing it become a much more friendly and comfortable place for beginners and experts alike. In this article, Wes Bos provides insight into some of the best tools to use in your day-to-day workflow in the command line and gets you started with a totally customized setup. Read more…

July 9, 2015 — Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting! Read more…

July 8, 2015 — What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? In this article, Sven Lennartz is here to have your back — with a little selection of handy goodies, icons, templates and tools to help you get off the ground faster. After reading this, you will have a few tools in your toolbox to approach that project head-on, without losing time, and focusing on crafting those websites that your users will love and keep returning to. Read more…

July 8, 2015 — Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community. Web technologies are fantastic. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts. Read more…

July 6, 2015 — Our priority as designers must be to solve problems; his is what we do. Responsive web design is a fantastic solution to the problem of creating virtual experiences that adapt to different devices. There are other problems out there that we’re called on to solve, though, not least of which is to make content of all kinds appear interesting and engaging. A page of plain text becomes a beautiful blog post, a mess of unconnected JPGs becomes a professional portfolio. Can we succeed at solving both of these problems? Read more…

July 4, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a very large icon set: the freebie contains 500 icons in four editable variants: outlined, solid, webby and flat, covering all sorts of various categories. The icons allow you to customize the stroke width and style, not to mention that you can change the color of the elements. They’re carefully crafted on a 60px grid which gives each icon consistency and crispness on all displays. Smashicons come in several styles. The AI and Sketch formats come in four styles: outline for mobile use; solid for hover state; webby for web; and flat for any creative project. The PSD format comes in two styles: outline for mobile use, and solid for hover states. Read more…

July 2, 2015 — Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design. Read more…

June 30, 2015 — As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for July 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…