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.
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What are the guidelines to follow when using data to personalize digital experiences, and how can organizations help people feel comfortable with personalization services that research clearly shows people want? CX and UX professionals are faced with the difficult task of helping clients navigate design decisions around privacy and personalization of digital services. It’s up to us to help clients understand the implications to business outcomes and ethics. To do this well, we must introduce privacy considerations into the design process as early as possible.
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We proudly craft affordable, practical books for pros like yourself who want to improve skills and make a difference. No fluff, no theory — just actionable insights applicable to your work right away. In this article, we bring you a quick overview of the last ones! We take pride in the time and efforts we put into creating our Smashing Books. We sincerely appreciate your support and trust — without you, we wouldn’t be able to release the books, and you should know that.
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Houdini is a new W3C task force that introduces a new set of APIs that will give developers the power to extend CSS itself, and the tools to hook into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. In this article, Philip Walton is going to talk about how Houdini will solve CSS feature problems and list some of the more exciting features currently in development. He’ll also offer some concrete things you as web developers can do today to help make Houdini a reality.
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In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you not only how to draw a cartoon in Adobe Illustrator, but also how to decide on character, place and situation in order to tell a story. Before grabbing your pencil or software tool, ask yourself, “What will be my topic?” How many characters you will use, and who will they be? What background will they move against? What era will they live in? In what scene will you put them? Through the steps in this tutorial, she will explain to you her own choices. Let’s begin!
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Today we are pleased to feature the new and free font families Yrsa and Rasa by David Březina and Anna Giedryś and their story behind the design process. David has written two articles about the project’s development in which they discussed what they meant by remixing and how they approached harmonization of the two different scripts, Latin and Gujarati. Today, as they release the fonts into the wild, David will explain what they’ve learned from a six-month-long exercise.
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You can now have multiple designs right next to each other in Photoshop! In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will design an entire set of assets all at once. He will walk you through the basics of artboards and Generate. Then he’ll look at a real project in which he used these techniques together, making for a major time-saver. First up, artboards. What many Photoshop users have been hoping for — with a push from Sketch, no doubt — finally arrives in the form of artboards.
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If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web.
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Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day. Vitaly Friedman loves finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support.
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It is encouraging to see a big increase in mobile web adoption and Google has definitely proved it has the last word when it comes to SEO. Responsive web design is the big winner of the go-mobile race and will most likely continue to gather the spoils. However, the mobile web has a lot of room for growth when it comes to strategies, user experience or conversions. The new .app top-level web domain together with WordPress’s REST API and the emerging JavaScript frameworks could definitely push things in the right direction. This year we might see a new development on the mobile web, a wave that will take us beyond responsiveness and into the promised land of web apps.
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