To make the best of SVG, it’s useful not only to learn its syntax but also to understand how SVG is generated by graphic design software. Let’s take a closer look at the process of generating SVG with popular design apps and how we can use them to our own advantage. In this post, Mikolaj Dobrucki will shed light on three of the most popular design tools: Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, and Figma. There are also other tools available supporting SVG that may have other functionalities and implement other solutions. This article should be enough to deal with the most common use cases.
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It’s essential to be ready to design for both visual and voice. Since prototyping for voice is new for many designers, it may be unclear as to where to start and what process to follow.
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The display specification is a very useful spec to understand as it underpins all of the different layout methods we have. Continuing a series on the display property in CSS, this time Rachel Andrew takes a look at the values which control box generation, for those times when you don’t want to generate a box at all.
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Artists and designers from across the globe once again got out their favorite tools and designed unique and inspiring wallpapers to welcome the new month. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. At the end of this post, we also collected some May favorites from past years’ wallpapers editions that are too good to gather dust somewhere down in the archives. Available with and without a calendar for May 2019. Enjoy!
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We had a wonderful time at the sold-out SmashingConf San Francisco! As always with any Smashing Conference, there were plenty of surprises! We had icecream and cookies, our amazing DJ Tobi Lessnow kept everyone well entertained between talks, and Vitaly opened the conference with just the right amount of balloons! In this article, Rachel Andrew rounds up all of the videos, photos, tweets and resources that were shared on- and offstage. Coming up next: SmashingConf Toronto.
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Design involves decisions, and those decisions are often flawed because our brains are wired for survival. The same brain features that literally helped us survive in the wild do not serve us well in the 21st-century workplace. In this article, Eric Olive will identify four decision-related traps that impede good design and offer techniques for avoiding these traps. These decision traps are based on research conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and behavioral economists including several cited here.
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DOM changes can be frequent, and as a result, there are instances where your app might need to respond to a specific change to the DOM. Monitoring for changes to the DOM is sometimes needed in complex web apps and frameworks. By means of explanations along with interactive demos, Louis Lazaris will show you how you can use the MutationObserver API to make observing for DOM changes relatively easy.
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Many mobile applications require access to location, photos, and even the camera during installation, which isn’t something most customers would be happy to consent to. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman talks about privacy-related design patterns. You’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with the notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience.
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The web is more than predictable compositions of rectangles, circles and triangles. With CSS Grid Layout, CSS Shapes and a bit of art direction we can achieve remarkable results — we just need a front-end strategy how to get there. That’s why we created “Art Direction for the Web,” a new Smashing Book for breaking out of generic experiences on the web. Now we can study the once uncharted territory of layout, type treatment and composition that print designers have skillfully and meticulously conquered, and explore which lessons from print we could bring to our web experiences today.
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Currently, with WordPress supporting Markdown, the format has become even more widely used. In this article, Sameer Borate will show you how to use Node.js and the Express framework to create an API endpoint. The context in which we will be learning this is by building an application that converts Markdown syntax to HTML. Along the way, you will also add authentication to your API endpoint, and you will also find ways to test your application endpoint using Postman.
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