CategoryTools

July 5, 2021 — HSL colors are very powerful when we use them the right way. They can save us time and effort and even help us to explore options for how to apply color to design. In this article, Ahmad Shadeed explains what HSL is, how to use it, and shares some of the useful use-cases and examples that you can use right away in your current projects. Read more…

July 2, 2021 — Email sending functionality is an integral part of every digital product that involves communication with its users (read: any online service). With so many tools and approaches, email still has quite a few pain points, both for developers and email marketers. Email is difficult because it has too many aspects to set and a few instances with no common rules to follow. Read more…

July 1, 2021 — When writing front-end tests, you’ll find a lot of pitfalls along the way. In sum, they can lead to lousy maintainability, slow execution time, and — in the worst case — tests you cannot trust. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this article, I will talk about common mistakes developers make, at least in my experience, and, of course, how to avoid them. Testing doesn’t need to be painful, after all. Read more…

June 30, 2021 — The web is single-threaded. This makes it increasingly hard to write smooth and responsive apps. Workers have a bad rep, but can be an important and useful tool in any web developer’s toolbelt for these kinds of problems. Let’s get up to speed on Workers on the Web! Read more…

June 28, 2021 — In this article, Manuel explains why Emmet is one of his favorite productivity tools for writing HTML and CSS, and how you can create custom Emmet snippets in Visual Studio Code to help you improve your front-end workflows even more. It takes some time to create these snippets, but it’s worth the effort because you can customize Emmet to your personal preferences, automate repetitive tasks and save time in the long run. Read more…

June 23, 2021 — What’s the state of HTML Email? How do we build and establish a successful design system? Frontend and design are remarkably complex these days. That’s why we invite kind, smart folks from the community to run online workshops for all of us to learn together. And we have new ones coming up, and we’d like to kindly welcome you to join in. Read more…

June 23, 2021 — Automated testing is an important part of any software project, including testing for accessibility. There are already tools for linting and integration testing accessibility, but what about end-to-end testing with real assistive technology? Since I hadn’t seen this before, I set out to build Auto VO, a driver for the VoiceOver screen reader. Read more…

June 22, 2021 — After years of innovation in both tools and processes, the struggle between design and development is still real. This article focuses on the best practices for improving the design to development processes and how cutting-edge solutions, such as UXPin powered by Merge technology, can help in facilitating the change. Read more…

June 16, 2021 — In a new short series of posts, we highlight some of the useful tools and techniques for developers and designers. Recently we’ve covered HTML Emails and SVG Generators. This time we look into different kinds of tools to help you streamline your accessibility testing process. Don’t miss the next one. Read more…

June 10, 2021 — We don’t need to write everything from scratch every single time. With boilerplates and starter kits, we can set up our projects faster, and get to work immediately. We’ve also just recently covered CSS auditing tools, CSS generators, accessible front-end components and VS code extensions — you might find them useful, too.  This collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that the team at Smashing found useful and hope will make your day-to-day work more productive and efficient. Read more…