February 5, 2019 — Good performance is critical to delivering a good user experience, and iOS users often have high expectations of their apps. A slow and unresponsive app might make users give up on using your app or, worse, leave a bad rating. In this article, Axel Kee is going to look into five optimization tricks that will make your app feel more responsive. Read more…

February 4, 2019 — It can be frustrating when you want to use a feature and discover that it is not supported or behaves differently across browsers. Dealing with old browsers — or browsers which do not support something that we want to use — is part of the job of a web developer. That said, things are far better now than in the past. In this article, Rachel Andrew details the different types of browser support issues, and shows how CSS is evolving to make it easier to deal with them. Read more…

February 1, 2019 — Creating a dashboard with API data is often a complex affair. Choosing your tech stack, integrating APIs, selecting the right charts and beautifying with CSS styles can become tricky. This tutorial is a step-by-step guide on how to help you create a weather dashboard in Vue.js using API data. Read more…

January 31, 2019 — Why not start the new month off with a fresh wallpaper? Designed by artists and designers from across the globe, Cosima Mielke brings you the wallpapers in this collection are available with and without a calendar for February 2019. Please note that ll images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper, and you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them? Read more…

January 30, 2019 — Block-based editors improve the user experience for those who create and publish content. What could future editors look like? Let’s compare the new authoring experience in WordPress with the experience from AEM. In this article, Kevin Weber is going to compare the new authoring experience in WordPress with the experience from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), an enterprise content management system that also embraces block-based editing. Read more…

January 29, 2019 — API-based solutions are becoming a critical building block of modern digital products. What are they? How can they impact your design process? Finally, how to evaluate them without bothering your software team? The growing amount of data and the need for speed in building products pushed APIs to become the lingua franca of digital teams. To design systems based on API-first systems, make sure you understand the vendors’ offerings. Today, Michał Sędzielewski brings you this hands-on testing guide which is a good starting point in doing so. It will help you explore the API capabilities even before you throw it to your teaching team, saving their energy — and yours as well. Read more…

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…