December 16, 2016 — How do designers design a website? Do they just mess around in Photoshop or Sketch for a while until a pretty design appears? You don’t have to be blessed by the design gods with special talent. So, how should you, a developer, learn design? This article is for design beginners. So, throughout the piece, Mason Gentry will use simplified definitions of user experience (UX) and visual design. Read more…

December 16, 2016 — In this article, you’ll find an overview of all of the obscure little things that I forget about every year; so, I decided to gather them all in one place once and for all. The list below serves as a personal reminder for yours truly, and I thought that it might be useful for you as well. In fact, I set up a yearly reminder on December 28th just to have a couple of days to free the mind for the more important things in life and to start the next year without second thoughts or unresolved issues. Curious? Well, let’s dive in! Read more…

December 15, 2016 — The web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year, and to make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, Cosima Mielke collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy! Read more…

December 15, 2016 — By using the shadow DOM, you can encapsulate the web component and not have to worry about specificity wars with any other style sheet on the page. However, web components and style guides currently seem to be at odds with each other. How can the two co-exist, with global style guides continuing to provide consistency and styles, even to web components with the shadow DOM? In this article, Steven Lambert brings solutions that work today, and there are more solutions to come, that enable global style guides to provide styling to web components. Read more…

December 14, 2016 — After building several client websites, ranging from small cafés to growing startups, Stefan Judis figured out that the holy WYSIWYG editor is not always the silver bullet we’re all looking for. These interfaces aim to make building websites easy, but there are always more use cases for your content on different platforms. In this article Stefan Judis will show you what he built and how his website surprisingly turned out to be his daily companion. Read more…

December 13, 2016 — Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will finish up the RainCat game and complete the introduction to SpriteKit. This is lesson three in your RainCat journey. Today you will learn how to create options for muting sounds; game-quitting option; and a main menu — with buttons Read more…

December 12, 2016 — In this article, Kyle Cassidy shares his thoughts and experiences on how lean thinking helped to instill efficiencies within his UX design process. For clients undertaking multiple projects, the lack of consistent wireframe deliverables was confusing and disorientating, with the client having to remember multiple URLs and logins while also learning how to navigate the various outputs. Many routine tasks were unnecessarily repeated across multiple projects. It was clear that they needed to establish some rules and guidelines to create a more cohesive approach. They needed to set a new direction, and now was the time to start. Read more…

December 9, 2016 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

December 9, 2016 — In this article, Cosima Mielke brings you some holiday-themed icon sets for you that’ll give your creative projects some holiday flair. Perfect for Christmas cards, gift tags, last-minute wrapping paper, or whatever else you can think of. All icons can be downloaded for free! Please consult their licenses or contact the creators before using them in commercial projects. Reselling a bundle is never cool, though. Have a happy holiday season! Read more…

December 9, 2016 — Sometimes animation that is nice and smooth in a simple demo runs very slowly on a real website, introduces visual artefacts or even crashes the browser. Why does this happen? How do we fix it? In this article, Sergey Chikuyonok aims to help you to better understand how the browser uses the GPU to render, so that you can create impressive websites that run quickly on all devices. Let’s do it! Read more…