CategoryTools

September 24, 2021 — You’ve seen them before. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. It’s time to fix them for good in a free Smashing online workshop next week. Today, Vitaly Friedman will take a look into carousels, modals, infinite scroll, parallax and scrolljacking, mega-dropdown menus, disabled buttons, inline validation, frozen filters, CAPTCHA, authentication and privacy. Read more…

September 23, 2021 — The new CSS accent-color property makes it quick and easy to roll out our brand colors to certain form inputs by leveraging user agent styles. It has the potential to provide quick and easy styling for many of our form elements, especially where extensive customization isn’t needed, as well as allowing the browser to pick the best options for accessibility. In this article Michelle Barker will take a look at what it does and how to use it alongside color-scheme for simple, accessible checkboxes and radio buttons — and imagine how you might use it in the future. Read more…

September 22, 2021 — We love little useful tools and techniques to help folks get their work done better and faster. Today, we’d love to shine the spotlights on a little helper that helps spot common performance bottlenecks easily: ct.css. Read more…

September 21, 2021 — Building a development environment with the shell as a keystone offers multiple benefits. You can use tools that fit nicely with each other, you can customize everything depending on your own needs, and the biggest of all, you can control your entire development environment with your keyboard. This can save a lot of cognitive energy as well as deliver a pleasant user experience. Read more…

September 21, 2021 — The last 18 months have been a time of unprecedented turbulence. As the people of the world have flooded online, businesses have joined them, using web development tools to adapt in real-time. Several years ago there seemed to be a gulf between drag-and-drop tools and full-blown web development. Today, it’s heartening to see the likes of Wix adding more code-heavy options to their repertoire. Read more…

September 15, 2021 — Front-end development is exciting and fast-moving. With newer CSS properties, we can brush the dust off our old techniques and give them another look. For years, pseudo-elements have faithfully helped front-end developers implement creative designs. While they still have an important place, we can now leave pseudo-elements behind in some scenarios, thanks to newer CSS properties. Read more…

September 14, 2021 — When designing for digital spaces, it’s natural to default to digital mockup tools, but doing so cuts out a world of possibilities. Analog drawing can unleash your imagination and allow you to focus on what’s most important at the start: the ideas. Read more…

September 9, 2021 — When paired with ISR and Next.js’ API routes, SWR can be used to create a responsive user experience. In this article, Sam Poder explains what SWR is, where to use it (and where not), and how to build a website by using Incremental Static Regeneration. This approach ensures that users still have a good experience, that the site is fast and that the data is kept up to date. Read more…

September 7, 2021 — Learn what’s new with developer tools in Firefox, Edge, Chrome and Safari. Discover new and powerful features that will help you be more comfortable and productive when testing and debugging across browsers. With this article, Patrick Brosset tries to make you want to try them out, and maybe will help you get more comfortable next time you need to debug a browser-specific issue. Read more…

September 1, 2021 — What exactly is a displacement filter? In this article, Dirk Weber will be diving into one of the most spectacular filter effects: the SVG feDisplacementMap filter primitive. In order to make it all easier to digest, Dirk has divided the article into three parts in which you’ll be exploring how the feDisplacementMap works, methods to create fancy displacement maps in SVG, and methods to animate the filter and create dramatic visual effects. Read more…