November 5, 2019 — What does it mean to be a freelance designer or developer? In this second episode of the Smashing Podcast we take a look a freelancing. Today, Drew McLellan talks to experienced freelance brand designer Liz Elcoate to find out more. Read more…

November 5, 2019 — In this inaugural episode of the Smashing Podcast, Drew McLellan talks to Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be used in our web projects? Find out about the book Art Direction For The Web, and catch up on the latest from Smashing Magazine. In this inaugural episode, Drew McLellan talks to designer, author, and speaker Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be applied to our web design projects? We dig into the topic and see if we can get to the bottom of things. Read more…

November 5, 2019 — Data import has historically been a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially for products that depend on ingesting a lot of data from users. That’s why many developers include CSV importers in their apps — to spare users from having to manually copy data from a spreadsheet into their database. But let’s face it: traditional data import solutions haven’t always been great. That’s why, today, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at how Flatfile helps you create a better import experience for your users, team, and product. Read more…

November 4, 2019 — 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?” Read more…

November 1, 2019 — In a lot of cases we can do these things with CSS —just not on the web. For example, CSS is also used for print formatting via user agents designed for outputting to PDF.  In this article, Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web and the CSS Specifications that might let us achieve them in the future. While most of her articles are about things we can do, this one is about things we can’t but that perhaps we might be able to do in the future. Take a look. Read more…

October 31, 2019 — What is it that makes a haunted house feel so disturbing? Is it the fact that it’s been long abandoned? That it’s riddled with dark and twisty hallways? That it simulates danger? Or maybe it’s the low-quality construction that makes people nervous? In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to take these frightening characteristics and spin them around for the web. After all, what is a website, but a digital house? (Let’s just make sure yours doesn’t feel haunted!) Read more…

October 31, 2019 — In many parts of the world, November is a rather gray month, so what better way could there be to start it off as with some colorful inspiration? Read more…

October 30, 2019 — This third part of the series will focus on adding a text-based client for the game engine that was created in part 2. Today, Fernando Doglio will explain basic architecture design, tool selection and code highlights by showing you how to create a text-based UI with the help of Node.js. Read more…

October 29, 2019 — Images are a big part of the web and, yet, they can cause a lot of challenges for the user experience if not properly optimized or delivered. It’s been almost a decade since Google introduced the world to WebP as a solution to this problem. As more of our browsers, devices and software support it, it’s time that web designers started adopting it as their default image format. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you What WebP is. Read more…

October 28, 2019 — The term COPE (“Create Once, Publish Everywhere”) is a methodology for publishing our content to different outputs (website, AMP site, email, apps, and so on) by having a single source of truth for all of them. Concerning WordPress, even though it has always shined as a Content Management System, implementing the COPE strategy has historically proved to be a challenge. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will explore how to implement COPE using WordPress. Read more…