In this article, Miriam Suzanne takes a deeper dive into the ‘CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables’ specification to ask, “Why are they called custom properties, how do they work in the cascade, and what else can we do with them?” Pushing past the “variable” metaphor, custom properties can provide new ways to balance context and isolation in CSS patterns and components.
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What could be a better way to welcome the new month than with a fresh wallpaper? Well, we might have something for you: wallpapers created with love by the community for the community — all available with and without a calendar for July 2019. Please note that all images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper, and you can feature your work in our magazine, too. So if you have an idea for an August wallpaper design, please don’t hesitate to submit it. We’d love to see what you’ll come up with.
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For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Users who favor searches tend to move quickly, scanning the page for that familiar-looking rectangle, and bouncing quickly when they don’t find what they’re looking for. Communicating with those users “at speed” is a tricky job that requires a specialized tool. In this article, Andrew Millen will show you how to use microcopy.
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This tutorial will help you transform an app that doesn’t work offline into a PWA that works offline and shows an update available icon. In this article, Jad Joubran will show you a step-by-step tutorial for adding a service worker to an existing one-page website. You will learn how to precache assets with workbox, handle dynamic caching as well as handle updates to your PWA. Follow along and see how you can also apply these techniques on your website.
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Web developers know what they’re doing in terms of optimizing a website for page speed, but is it enough in Google’s eyes? When it comes to mobile loading speeds, your website can always be faster. And if you’ve implemented all of the caching, minification and other optimizations you possibly can, it’s time for the web designer to step in and get creative. As a writer, Suzanne Scacca takes care of the on-page optimizations while the developer she hands content over to does the technical SEO stuff. Web designers and developers can easily tackle the parts of speed optimization that are in each of their wheelhouses.
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When customers interact with your brand, they’re not aware of what’s going on backstage, and there is no reason they should. All they perceive is the play you’re presenting, the story you’re sharing, and the solution it represents for them. There is only one brand experience. At the end of the day, customers are not tasting individual ingredientz, they’re eating the entire meal. At once. In sit-downs that keep getting shorter. When the individual actors go off script, as great as they might sound solo, the brand experience breaks.
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We are still at the beginning stages of the new technological revolution — the exciting time when technologies like AR will be an expected part of our daily routines — and it’s our opportunity to create a solid foundation for the future generation of designers. Designers who work on AR projects have a role of explorers — they experiment and try various approaches in order to find the one that works best for their product and delivers the value for people who will use it. In this article, Gleb Kuznetsov shares his personal experience and advice on how to create and design AR apps.
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Email is a great tool for, first, acquiring leads from a website and, later, converting and retaining them. But just as you now approach web design with a mobile-first mentality, the same switch should occur as you design email marketing campaigns for your clients. If users are more likely to open email on mobile and we know that opened emails convert at a higher rate than those that go unopened, wouldn’t it make sense for designers to prioritize the mobile experience when designing emails? In this article, Suzanne Scacca brings you some facts and tips you need to know for designing mobile-first emails.
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The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. You probably have heard of JAMstack — the new web stack based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup — but what does it mean for your workflow and when does it make sense in your projects? We’ve kindly asked Phil Hawksworth to run a webinar explaining what JAMStack actually means and when it makes sense, as well as how it affects tooling and front-end architecture.
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Like all good things, Google Fonts do come with a cost. Each font carries a weight that the web browser needs to download before they can be displayed. Google Fonts are easy to implement, but they can have a big impact on your page load times. With the correct setup, the additional load time isn’t noticeable. However, get it wrong and your users could be waiting up to a few seconds before any text is displayed. In this article, Danny Cooper will explore how we can load them in the most optimal way.
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