Did you know that there are three brain networks that are involved in creativity? In this article, Susan Weinschenk explores what creativity is, the recent brain science on what is happening in your brain when you are being creative, and the role of creativity in UX design. Is creativity something you can just turn on? Are some people just creative and others aren’t? And if so, which one are you? Let’s explore.
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Caching delivers a faster response, and frees up resources in the server. When optimizing the speed of our websites from the server side, caching ranks among the most critical tasks to get just right. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz examines an architecture based on self-rendering components and SSR, how do we identify those sections of code that require user state, isolate them from the page, and make them be rendered on the client-side only?and analyzes how to implement it for WordPress sites through Gutenberg.
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A roundup of Advent Calendar sites of interest to web designers and developers. From accessibility to UX, coding challenges to Perl, there really is something for everyone this December. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you calendars which are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts, share the articles that you enjoyed reading, and join the discussions respectfully. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you can certainly learn a lot of new things over the next 24 days.
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December is here, so why not spread some holiday love across your devices — we’ve got some truly eye-catching wallpapers to sweeten the last days of the year. Remember that all 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?
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Using a Structured Content Management System (SCMS) can be a great way to free your content from a paradigm that begins to feel its age. In this article, Knut Melvær suggests some overarching strategies, with some concrete real-world examples on how to think about working with structured content. This is the guide Knut wished had the last couple of years when running projects with headless Content Management Systems (CMSs), and we hope it will be helpful to you!
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Throughout this tutorial, Ahmed Bouchefra introduces Angular Router and how you can use it to create client-side apps and Single Page Apps with routing and navigation. You will see how to use the Angular Router to add routing and navigation into our application. Also Ahmed will take a look at different concepts like the Router outlet, routes, and paths and we created a demo to practically show the different concepts. You can access the code from this repository.
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Progressive web applications (PWAs) are more of a methodology that involves a combination of technologies to make powerful web applications. In this article, Ankita Masand will look at the pain points of users who are browsing old non-PWA websites and the promise of PWAs to make the web great. You’ll learn most of the important technologies that make for cool PWAs, like service workers, web push notifications and IndexedDB.
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Overusing inline CSS or JS code, as opposed to serving code through static resources, can harm the site’s performance. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will learn how to load dynamic code through static files instead, avoiding the drawbacks of too much inline code. You will see, as an example, how WordPress loads 43kb of scripts to print the Media Manager, which are pure JavaScript templates and could perfectly be loaded as static resources.
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It’s getting clearer that design makes all the difference and that unifying designs to a standard model like the Google Material Design Kit doesn’t work well. By using it, you’ll get a decent design that works from a technical perspective, of course. But you won’t create a unique experience with it, an experience that lasts or that reaches people on a personal level. Major updates, new tools, valuable lessons learned. In his monthly reading list, Anselm summarizes everything that’s new and important to know for web developers this November.
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Today is a very important day for us. We celebrate the first year of Smashing Membership. Those who have been with us from the start will receive an email with details of a present from us to say thank you, and we’ll give you a taste of what’s to come in year two. Now that the team is larger, we’ll be bringing you more content — going up to three webinars a month. The price stays the same. And, of course, we’d love your input on subjects or speakers!
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