Design systems can improve usability, but they can also limit creativity or fall out of sync with actual products. In this article, we’ll explore how designers and developers can create more robust design systems by building a culture of collaboration.
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By naming lines when setting up our CSS Grid layouts, we can tap into some interesting and useful features of Grid — features that become even more powerful when we introduce subgrids. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to demonstrate an approach to this kind of editorial design, which builds on a few techniques. In addition to this being a nice way to name sections of your layout, this technique exposes a whole bunch of interesting things about Grid Layout which you may find useful in creating your own layout patterns.
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In this fifth installment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you about Bea Feitler, who directed Harper’s Bazaar throughout the 1960s and has been described as “the pioneering female art director you’ve never heard of.” Andy will teach you about Feitler’s confident work and show you how to apply some of her design techniques to the work you make for the web. In this article, you’ll learn how to emphasize scale and maintain its contrast on even the smallest screens. Andy will teach you how to make confident color choices, and how to use pattern and texture to add depth to your designs.
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Speech-to-text promises to save time transcribing long audio sources like podcasts and interviews. However, the poor quality of the resulting transcription severely limits the technology’s present use cases. We attempt various methods to improve transcription quality, but ultimately the technology fails to accurately represent human speech. That said, its speed and low cost compared to manual transcription still leaves us with some interesting use cases. In this article, Philip Kiely will use speech-to-text to draft transcripts of podcasts and interviews for publication. He ’ll also evaluate the overall accuracy of these format-transformation technologies by running a few samples through round-trip transcriptions.
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Design is increasingly becoming more complex. Design processes require having a tight cross-functional collaboration between all teams involved in the creation of the product. Having a shared design language empowers teams to collaborate more effectively. That’s why many companies invest in design systems. But how can we ensure that a design system actually works for a product you’re working on and improves your team’s productivity? In this article, Nick Babich will try to find the qualities that make a design system good for your product development.
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We had a lovely time at SmashingConf Freiburg. In this post, Rachel Andrew wrappes up the event, including links to the video of all of the presentations, so you can relive what you enjoyed — or share in something of what you missed.
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Get ready for October and the upcoming Halloween season with a fresh batch of wallpapers. Created with love by the community for the community.
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It’s official! Next year, we’ll be organizing a SmashingConf in each of these cities: San Francisco, Freiburg, New York and Austin! We’re planning to build on the success and the things we have learned in 2019, so that we can bring you a practical two days of learning — with plenty of fun and surprises along the way!
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Denys Mishunov recently discussed what “Frankenstein Migration” is, compared it to conventional types of migrations, and mentioned two main building blocks: microservices and Web Components. He also showed you a theoretical basis of how this type of migration works. If you didn’t read or forgot that discussion, you might want to get back to Part 1 first because it helps to understand everything we’ll cover in this second part of the article.
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What if you spend the unproportionate amount of time to support an outdated system?
The typical answer to such a problem is the migration of the application. However, all of the front-end frameworks are different. In this article, Denys Mishunov will show you “Frankenstein Migration” which is a new, framework-agnostic approach to the process of migration that allows using the same mechanism to migrate to pretty much any framework of your choice.
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