December 19, 2012 — In this article, which focuses on smartphones, not tablets, we’ll look at design patterns and approaches used for mobile e-commerce functionality, including home pages, photo galleries, and more. All the examples are drawn from mobile websites that run in smartphone browsers. Read more…

December 17, 2012 — Vertical rhythm is clearly an important part of Web design, yet on the subject of baseline, our community seems divided and there is no consensus as to how it fits in — if at all — with our growing and evolving toolkit for designing online. Read more…

December 15, 2012 — Today, we have a beautiful Christmas icon freebie for you created by the talented, hard-working folks at RocketTheme. The icon set contains ten icons available as 256×256px PNGs that have been lovingly and exclusively prepared for Smashing Magazine and the Web design community. As usual, this set is released under a Creative Commons license and can be used in commercial and private projects. Read more…

December 14, 2012 — JavaScript has been called everything from great to awful to the assembly language of the Web, but we all use it. Love JavaScript or hate it: everyone admits there are serious flaws and not many other choices. Read more…

December 12, 2012 — Yes, our brand new Smashing Mobile Book has finally arrived, and it has almost reached your doorstep! If you’ve already pre-ordered the book weeks ago, then it’s really only a matter of days! Read more…

December 11, 2012 — Do you own a website? Do you want to be number one on Google? Whatever you do, don’t spend money on aggressive search engine optimization (SEO). I know that sounds like an extreme position to take. However, a lot of website owners see search engine optimization as the answer to their search ranking woes, when things are considerably more complex. Read more…

December 11, 2012 — The shortcode ability of WordPress is extremely underrated. It enables the end user to create intricate elements with a few keystrokes while also modularizing editing tasks. This tutorial is for experienced WordPress users; we will be looking at the widgets object and shortcodes. Read more…

December 10, 2012 — The latest version of Safari doesn’t make such great strides as the previous update did, but there are some tools in there which will be of use or interest to developers. These include: File upload, Web audio, CSS images, and more. Read more…

December 10, 2012 — This article covers the fundamental concepts for utilizing smart device technologies and sensor data in order to understand context and introduce “adaptive thinking” into the UX professional’s toolset. The author demonstrates the importance of context when designing adaptive experiences and gives ideas on how to design adaptive systems. Read more…

December 8, 2012 — We published the article “Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away” in which Alastair Johnston discussed the evolution of Helvetica, the reasons for its popularity as well as his thoughts on why designers should start questioning the usefulness of Helvetica in their projects. Hours later Indra Kupferschmid published an article in which she corrected some of the facts presented in the original article. We republish Indra’s article to correct the factual errors, with her permission of course. Read more…