September 24, 2013 — The dream of a “magical” image format that will solve the responsive images problem lives on. Yoav Weiss started wondering if such an image format could be used to solve both the art direction and resolution-switching use cases. So he created a prototype to prove its feasibility. The prototype is now available, ready to be tinkered with. In this post, Yoav explains what this prototype does, what it cannot do, how it works, and its advantages and disadvantages relative to markup solutions. Read more…

September 23, 2013 — User research helps us to understand how other people live their lives, so that we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions. It helps us to avoid our own biases, because we frequently have to create design solutions for people who aren’t like us. In this article, David Sherwin will share a process he uses at Frog to plan and conduct user research. It’s called the “research learning spiral.” Read more…

September 20, 2013 — In the previous article on Smashing Magazine, we discussed seven excellent extensions that could fundamentally change your Web design workflow in Adobe Fireworks. Ashish Bogawat would like to add to the list six more extensions. These are extensions that he always installs whenever he sets up Adobe Fireworks for himself or anyone on his team and that have proven to be big time-savers over the period that I’ve been using them. Read more…

September 20, 2013 — When Vitaly Friedman started developing websites, he was lucky to have hundreds of valuable articles that would help him become better at what he did. But ears have passed and blogs have emerged. As the time was progressing, every now and again he kept revisiting his bookmarks just to realize that all this fantastic, valuable content was slowly fading away from him. Read more…

September 19, 2013 — In 2010, Microsoft shifted its focus from propriety Web technology to open Web technology. This refocus materialized a few years later — in Internet Explorer, the Windows operating system, its developer tools and its cloud software and things have changed for the better so far. Across the board, Web developers should see significant improvements, making Windows an HTML5-friendly platform. Read more…

September 18, 2013 — Dean Hume has been involved in many interviews during his career as a software developer and manager. Whether the interviewer or interviewee, he has always paid special attention to the interview process. Preparation is the key to success and can take the stress out of the dreaded process. Interviews can be scary, especially when you attend your first. If you are prepared and your mind is ready, then the whole process should be a breeze! Read more…

September 18, 2013 — While working for Simple Focus, a couple of our designers noticed how images always scaled perfectly. The line length of hypertext, on the other hand, changes based on its parent element’s width, which has a negative effect on readability. One of our designers asked, “wouldn’t it be nice, if text worked more like images?” and a few weeks later FlowType.JS was fully-developed and ready to be sent into the world. Here’s the process of how we got there. Read more…

September 17, 2013 — This article scratches the surface of the Three.js library. Once you are comfortable with the API, experimenting with particles, mapping and more complicated meshes can yield incredible results. Three.js is a gold mine for creating beautiful and complex Web experiments. Taking the extremely simple demonstration explained here and turning it into a mind-blowing experiment merely takes experimentation and the willingness to try new things. Read more…

September 16, 2013 — Responsive design for images is about optimizing the process of serving images to users. In this article, Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund will share their responsive image technique, the “padding-bottom” technique, which they researched and implemented on the mobile version of the Swedish news website Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest website). The technique presented here applies to all types of responsive websites. Read more…

September 13, 2013 — In this article, we feature a set of 33 flat e-commerce icons, created exclusively for Smashing Magazine by Responsive. The icons are suited to e-commerce projects and include many popular payment providers. The set includes Photoshop and Illustrator files containing all of the icons. Read more…