June 1, 2016 — BEM has been an absolute lifesaver for me in my effort to create applications in a modular, component-driven way. David Berner has been using it for nearly three years now, and the problems above are the few stumbling blocks he’s hit along the way. This article aims to be useful for people who are already BEM enthusiasts and wish to use it more effectively or people who are curious to learn more about it. Read more…

May 31, 2016 — This creativity mission has been going on for eight years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed to it and who are still enthusiastically continuing to do so each month. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. It’s time to give your desktop a makeover! Read more…

May 30, 2016 — When we design responsive websites, we tend to see responsive design merely as a collection of slightly differently sized rectangles, with a slightly different layout, sometimes with slightly different content poured into them. In this article, Vitaly Friedman features some of the slightly more obscure design patterns, such as responsive car-builder interfaces, mega dropdown navigation, content grids, maps and charts, as well as responsive art direction. Read more…

May 27, 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…

May 27, 2016 — The WordPress server stack has had to evolve over the years to keep up with this need for speed, therefore WordPress server stack looks quite different today than it did a few years ago. To better understand it, Carl Alexander is going to explore this new stack in detail. You’ll see how the various pieces fit together to make a WordPress website fast.Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more! Read more…

May 26, 2016 — From coworking spaces geared to nurturing the next generation of tech unicorns to boutique offerings, coffee shops, amazing workshops, art galleries and even a beach locale, Gemma Church has scoured a hundred coworking spaces across the world. Coworking spaces allow freelancers, small business owners and independent workers to rent a working area that is shared with others. The setup is usually more casual than the fixed rental agreement you would get in a dedicated office space. Read more…

May 25, 2016 — Benefits such as personal growth, creative exploration and generation of professional opportunities are some of the reasons to engage in personal side projects. In this article, Jon Yablonski will explore these benefits, as well as learn how to decide on a project and how to effectively manage your time. Finally, for inspiration, Jon will look at some great examples of personal projects. We hope you will be inspired to start your own side project! Read more…

May 25, 2016 — Stylelint is a powerful style sheet linter. It brings clarity to code and saves you from errors. It’s useful for everyone. Once you start using it, you will hear no more comments like, “You forgot to remove it there.” in this article, Aleks Hudochenkov will show you why linting a style sheet matters, how stylelint brings order to a style sheet and how we can avoid errors. Happy developing, and may you have a peaceful code review. Read more…

May 24, 2016 — Melody Jams may not have made the creators millionaires, but it’s with no doubt an incredibly successful project. Since Melody Jams’ launch Jamie Kosoy and his team overcame massive technical, mental and physical challenges to produce something that is of really high quality. A certain kind of ruthlessness was required with the number of features they wanted to create. They had to go well out of their way to prove their trust to one another. And they had to constantly be making stuff to show each other, rather than just talking about what they were going to make. Read more…

May 23, 2016 — Dependencies are everywhere. They’re unavoidable. They aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t consider the possibility a given dependency might not be met, you run the risk of frustrating your users. Reducing dependencies improves the likelihood that your site will be usable by the greatest number of people in the widest variety of scenarios. Even knowing this, however, it’s easy to overlook the most basic dependencies our projects have, undermining their resilience in the process. To illustrate this point, consider the humble submit button. Read more…