Welcome to another monthly update to keep you all in the loop about all things smashing. Today, join Iris Lješnjanin as she share the latest news and highlight the things we have enjoyed reading over the past month. In the fast-paced industry that designers and developers work in, it’s important to stay up to date as much as possible. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with monthly updates to help you stay on top of things.
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A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. In this article, Barry Rueger will show you why designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, “I can read it, so what’s the problem?”
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You want to build a mobile website or PWA that converts visitors into leads or customers. But with Google and consumers alike becoming ever more demanding when it comes to loading speeds, what more can you do? ImageKit, a digital image optimization service, might have the all-in-one hands-off solution you need. Today, Suzanne Scacca will focus on how you can still design with as many images as you want without slowing down your website.
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In the fast-paced industry that designers and developers work in, it’s important to stay up to date as much as possible. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with monthly updates to help you stay on top of things. This is the first monthly update that the Smashing team will be publishing, to highlight some of the things we have enjoyed reading over the past month.
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Margins in CSS seem simple enough at first glance. Applied to an element it forms a space around the element, pushing other elements away. However, in this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at some of the things which trip people up with regard to using margins. In particular, you will be looking at how margins interact with each other, and how margin collapsing actually works. As with anything in CSS, share with your team the decisions you make, and comment your code!
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Like all good things, Google Fonts do come with a cost. Each font carries a weight that the web browser needs to download before they can be displayed. Google Fonts are easy to implement, but they can have a big impact on your page load times. With the correct setup, the additional load time isn’t noticeable. However, get it wrong and your users could be waiting up to a few seconds before any text is displayed. In this article, Danny Cooper will explore how we can load them in the most optimal way.
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Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. In this article, Sandrina Pereira will share how this outcome can be changed by changing your mindset during a code review as a team, as an author and as a reviewer.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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To make the best of SVG, it’s useful not only to learn its syntax but also to understand how SVG is generated by graphic design software. Let’s take a closer look at the process of generating SVG with popular design apps and how we can use them to our own advantage. In this post, Mikolaj Dobrucki will shed light on three of the most popular design tools: Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, and Figma. There are also other tools available supporting SVG that may have other functionalities and implement other solutions. This article should be enough to deal with the most common use cases.
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We had a wonderful time at the sold-out SmashingConf San Francisco! As always with any Smashing Conference, there were plenty of surprises! We had icecream and cookies, our amazing DJ Tobi Lessnow kept everyone well entertained between talks, and Vitaly opened the conference with just the right amount of balloons! In this article, Rachel Andrew rounds up all of the videos, photos, tweets and resources that were shared on- and offstage. Coming up next: SmashingConf Toronto.
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