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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There is a wide variety of choices when it comes to creating a PDF from a web application. In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the tools that are available and shares her recommendations to help you find the tool that works best for you. She’ll explore ways in which we can generate a PDF directly from a web application on the fly. It isn’t a comprehensive list of tools, but instead Rachel is aiming to demonstrate the different approaches. If you have a favorite tool or any experiences of your own to share, please add them to the comments below.
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Creating complex SVG animations can be a challenging and tedious task — but not anymore. In this article, Mikołaj Dobrucki will show you how to create path animations for the web using SVGator, an online app created especially for the purpose of animating SVG files. It is a web-based app that allows you to import static SVG files, animate them using a user-friendly visual interface, and export them as animated SVG. Exported animations are CSS-based and ready to use on the web.
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Figma has become a very popular tool for web and product designers, mainly because of its focus on design teams and team libraries. In this article, Emiliano Cicero aims to help you avoid mistakes and assist you with the building of your own Figma component library. He’ll also cover in detail the components’ organization and will give you a possible solution if you have a large number of icons in the library.
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Whether it’s you adding Webmentions, removing tracking scripts from a website, recycling plastic, picking up trash from the street to throw it into a bin, or cycling instead of driving to work for a week, we all can make things better for ourselves and the people around us. We just have to do it. For his monthly reading list, Anselm Hannemann summarized what has happened in the web development world in the past few weeks. From browser news and UI/UX to privacy, tooling, work and life.
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Through this unique “Inspired design decisions” series of article and webinars, Andy Clarke will change that. In the first edition of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy will “Say hello to skinny columns,” a technique which adds one extra narrow column to an otherwise conventional column grid. He explains how to design with, then implement skinny columns using meaningful markup and efficient CSS. He also explains how to design using modular grids to fill your designs with energy.
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Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. In this article, Sandrina Pereira will share how this outcome can be changed by changing your mindset during a code review as a team, as an author and as a reviewer.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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