October 29, 2024 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #480
This newsletter issue was sent out to 194,396 subscribers on Tuesday, October 29, 2024.
Editorial
There is something magical in bringing people and teams together. This week, we’re at SmashingConf Antwerp with 500 attendees in the magnificent Bourla Theatre. From a Walking Waffles tour and chocolate workshop to jam sessions and an after-party, it’s much more than a two-day conference (IYKYK).
In this newsletter, we’d love to prompt you to stop for just a moment and revise how you work. Explore what your colleagues are doing: which tools are they using to get things done? There are plenty of resources and conversation starters in here to kick off a conversation in your team.
On another note, we’ve been relentlessly working hard on the upcoming online workshops and friendly events:
- Smashing Meets Product Design 🚀 (Dec 5) — our new Meets event on product design and UX,
- Smart Interface Design Patterns UX Training 🍣 (Nov 1) — with Vitaly Friedman,
- Measure UX and Design Impact 🧪 — shiny new video course + UX training with Vitaly Friedman.
And as always, we are sending a lot of positive energy, optimism, strength, and love from the very bottom of our hearts here at the Smashing team. Stay safe and healthy, everyone!
1. Good Movies As Old Books
Vintage books have a very special appeal to them. The debossing and gold foils on beautiful linen-bound hardcover editions, worn corners that show how loved a paperback book once was — and, of course, there’s the book cover design, taking us on a journey through the history of typesetting and graphic design.
For his project Good Movies As Old Books, Matt Stevens envisioned some of his favorite movies as vintage books. Mission Impossible, Back to the Future, Pulp Fiction, Karate Kid, LaLa Land, they are all there. Complete with tears, coffee stains, and old price stickers, they look super realistic and as if someone had just pulled them out of the shelf to take a photo. Eye candy at its finest, not only for book or movie lovers. (cm)
2. iOS Interaction Prototypes
Swiping up to unlock, pulling down to open the control center, pinching to zoom in or out — gestures like these are universally understood by anyone who uses a smartphone. Gavin Nelson came up with a series of iOS interaction prototypes that explore new and fluid ways to interact with the operating system.
Gavin’s collection includes seven interesting concepts, among them a time machine scrolling concept that lets you jump around your iMessage conversation history, a “Now Playing” widget that uses fluid gestures to expand, collapse, and move around the home screen, and a tableview transition that is different from what we usually see.
Originally created to become more proficient at prototyping in SwiftUI, Gavin’s prototypes are a treasure chest for anyone looking for some interaction design inspiration that leaves the beaten path and tries something new. (cm)
3. Cursor Party
Imagine you’re visiting a blog, and you see other people’s cursors moving around as they read. And if you’re lucky, you might even end up in a conversation with them. What might sound like some futuristic concept is actually feasible today.
Matt Webb is the inventor of what he calls “Cursor Party,” a lightweight feature that creates a feeling of cozy togetherness online. Yes, things will get busy when you see other cursors moving in real-time, but that’s part of the fun, and, of course, there’s also a quiet mode toggle that appears before things get annoying or when someone starts chatting. If you want to install the feature on your site, Matt open-sourced the code. (cm)
4. Architecture Antipatterns
Domain allergy, cargo-culting, over-engineering — all of them are common mistakes in software architecture. Architecture Antipatterns helps us understand and discover common antipatterns like these to build better software architectures and improve existing ones.
The site examines different types of architecture antipatterns, why they happen, how we can avoid getting in the situation, and, of course, how to get out of it again. And since nothing beats learning from real-world mistakes, there is also a collection of case studies that illustrate how good ideas resulted in bad consequences and how they were resolved in the end. Lots of valuable takeaways are guaranteed. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Interface Design Patterns UX Training (Autumn 2024) ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 1 – Dec 2 - Advanced Design Systems workflow
with Brad Frost. Nov 12–20 - Figma Workflow Masterclass design
with Christine Vallaure. Nov 13–22 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Dec 2–11 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Dec 4–12 - Jump to all workshops →
6. Designing Depth
How can we distill a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional screen while conveying story and depth? Rauno Freiberg wrote a wonderful guide on designing depth, with detailed real-life examples of how foreground and background objects and motion choreography help enhance a composition.
The guide dives deep into blurred backdrops, timing and artificial delays, staggering motion, and indicating affordance. An inspiring look at how introducing principles from nature can create visual interest and prevent a design from falling flat. (cm)
7. Maximizing User Engagement Without Exploitation
As UX strategies for maximizing user engagement are based on psychological principles and behavior patterns that are often outside a user’s control, designers need to weigh their design decisions responsibly to ensure they don’t cause any harm by creating addictive products. Taras Bakusevych shines a light on UX strategies that drive user growth and retention without exploiting users.
Based on popular behavioral design frameworks, Taras developed a unified formula for fostering long-term user engagement: the Sustainable Engagement Loop. Designed as a cyclical process, it builds and maintains habits in six key stages — from prompting users to take action to fostering ongoing engagement.
To prevent harmful consequences like doomscrolling, unhealthy competition, and social comparison and ensure the well-being of users, Taras’ article also highlights ethical considerations to keep in mind. A must-read for every designer. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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