January 28, 2019 — Providing scalable and resilient service to a growing customer base across the Internet is very complex. At the end of the day, it’s your job to make good decisions about how to use their services. when your client asks you if something should run in the cloud, you need to ask questions like: How much does it need to scale? How fast does it need to run for users around the world? How complex is the software you need to run? In this article, Zack Grossbart & Eduardo Abe will help you with that. Read more…

January 24, 2019 — You’ve proven your expertise in designing mobile-first websites for clients. It might be time you made a move into designing mobile-first marketing campaigns for them as well. With this guide, Suzanne Scacca explains how to do just that. She will examine the key areas of marketing that stem from the websites you build. Then, zero in on the ways in which designers should adjust these marketing strategies for mobile-friendly and mobile-first audiences. Read more…

January 24, 2019 — Tables are a design pattern for displaying large amounts of data in rows and columns, and have been used for this purpose as early as the 2nd century and when the world started to go digital, tables came along with us. Tables have not yet seemed to fall out of favor, so, in this article, Huijing Chen will take a look at how we can create tables on the web in 2019. Read more…

January 23, 2019 — When it comes to change, we tend to naturally resist it. The only real boundary we have are our brains telling us that things are best to be left as they’ve always been. But we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in Human-Computer Interaction — rethinking the whole concept of digital experience. In the next decade, designers will break the glass and move to the interfaces of the future — sophisticated voice interfaces, advanced ARs, and truly immersive VRs. In this article, Gleb Kuznetsov shares his thoughts and ideas of how interfaces will look like and what sort of extraordinary experiences we can expect in the near future. Read more…

January 22, 2019 — People who read Smashing Magazine, come to our conferences, and sign up as members. Given that we don’t ever get to meet or interact with the majority of folks who visit the site, this can make it quite difficult for us to better understand our readers and subscribers. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you a Smashing Survey. We want to find out about you, our readers, so that we can better bring you the tutorials, articles and resources that you need. Read more…

January 21, 2019 — In the world of APIs, GraphQL has lately overshadowed REST due to its ability to query and retrieve all required data in a single request. Using a component-based API makes most sense when the website is itself built using components, i.e. when the webpage is iteratively composed of components wrapping other components until, at the very top, we obtain a single component that represents the page.  In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will describe a different type of API, based around components, which takes a step further the amount of data it can fetch from a single request. Read more…

January 18, 2019 — Anselm is back with a new edition of his Monthly Web Development Update. A reading list to help you rethink existing systems and habits and find the solution that really fits your product. Read more…

January 17, 2019 — The visual cortex is the part of the brain that processes visual information. Each of the senses has an area of the brain where the signals for that sensory perception are usually sent and processed. Given the way our brains work, there are things you can do that will grab your user’s visual attention. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how the visual cortex of our brains plays a vital role in controlling our behavior. Read more…

January 16, 2019 — HTML5 introduced thirteen new types of form input, adding significantly to the number of different fields web designers and developers could add to our forms. These new types all require browsers to support them, and take-up has been slower than some of us would have liked. What is the state of those field types in 2019? Which can we use, and which should still be avoided? Read more…

January 15, 2019 — Climate change may not seem like an issue that should concern web developers, but the truth is that our work does have a carbon footprint, and it’s about time we started to think about that. As web developers, it’s understandable to feel that this is not an issue over which we have any influence, but this isn’t true. Many efforts are afoot to improve the situation on the web. The Green Web Foundation maintains an ever-growing database of web hosts who are either wholly powered by renewable energy or are at least committed to being carbon neutral. So, apart from powering servers with renewable energy, what else can web developers do about climate change? Read more…