February 4, 2016 — In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will be able to distinguish how Illustrator works with Live Trace and with the Pen Tool. Two different results from the same image, the first close to hand-drawing, the second more of a cartoon style. First you’ll need to know how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don’t worry! You can download her drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator. Read more…

February 3, 2016 — There have been some amazing quantum leaps in JavaScript tooling which have made it possible for you to dive head first into writing fully ES6 modules, without compromising on the essentials like testing, linting and (most importantly) the ability for others to easily consume what we write. In this article, Jim Cowart is going to focus on how to create a JavaScript package written in ES6 that’s usable in a site or app regardless of whether you’re using CommonJS, asynchronous module definition (AMD) or plain browser global modules. Read more…

February 2, 2016 — Service workers do a lot of different things; there are myriad ways to harness their powers. In this article, Lyza Danger Gardner explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle. She decided to build a simple service worker for her website that roughly mirrors the features (provide a customized offline fallback experience, make the website function offline, and increase online performance by reducing network requests for certain assets) that the obsolete Application Cache API used to provide. Read more…

February 1, 2016 — Today’s post features a collection of unique desktop wallpapers for February 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions, with and without a calendar, and can be downloaded for free. Created by designers and artists from across the globe, they are just waiting to give your desktop a makeover and provide you with some fresh inspiration. Now you only need to decide which one will accompany you through the month — and that won’t be easy given all the creative ideas the community has come up with. A big thank-you to everyone who participated! Read more…

January 29, 2016 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? 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…

January 29, 2016 — This colourful, creative, fun and completely free icon set was created from Manuela Langella specially for the Smashing Magazine readers. Enjoy these cartoon style icons and spread the word about this freebie. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, though reselling bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word about the freebie. A big thank you to Manuela Langella for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Read more…

January 27, 2016 — Does every site looks the same to you? With so many tools and resources, web designers have to be generic to fit content in frameworks and templates. If everyone just follows best practices, we’ll create the perfect web. In this case, what’s the point of web designers if there’s a recipe? Creating empty carousels and sexy hero images is easy. Adding meaning through design is much more difficult. In this article, let’s consider content, rules and pattern fatigue as major obstacles to creativity online. How can we break through it? Read more…

January 27, 2016 — Here you’ll find the first animated GIF, containing a location clue. To move to the next level, you have to find a hidden hash tag and follow a link in a tweet containing it. Read more…

January 26, 2016 — In this article, Nadav Soferman introduces a new free open source web tool that will allow you to generate breakpoints for your images interactively: the Responsive Breakpoints Generator. Nadav hopes this tool will help you address some of the challenges related to responsive images. This complexity is the driving force for new solutions that keep arising, such as the HTML5 picture element and srcset image attribute, the Client-Hints specification, and plenty of other client-side and server-side solutions. Read more…

January 25, 2016 — Besides creating the best conditions for users to complete their tasks, it’s important to map their motivation to convert their good intentions into tangible outcomes. When UX combines motivation with users’ ability and triggers, it gets easier to persuade them to perform an action. In this article, we’ll explain from a psychological perspective what drives behaviour, and we’ll share three tips on how you can use these insights along with UX best practices to change your users’ behaviour — and count on the formal model Fogg’s to help you structure research and design processes to ensure that users’ needs are considered. Read more…