December 24, 2015 — 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 23, 2015 — Every web professional is different. Practices such as turning off email at key times during the day to avoid distractions, taking weekend and vacation time for himself and avoiding filling that time with more work, or attending to professional conferences to keep the passion for web design going, worked wonders for Jeremy Girard’s own productivity. Like many web professionals, his first instinct was to work longer hours – to come into the office early, stay late, and to give up some of his own weekend time. While this certainly helped him get more work done, he quickly realized it was not something he could sustain without eventually burning out. Read more…

December 23, 2015 — By focusing almost exclusively on the user insights that each test is designed to yield, prototype testing can be an impressively efficient method for product teams to run experiments. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it. In this article, Michelle Chu gives six tips for designers to consider when creating prototypes specifically to generate user testing insight. Read more…

December 21, 2015 — Single-page applications tend to take the form of runtimes, JavaScript executables deployed like popup shops into vacant  elements. In this article, Heydon Pickering will introduce a solution for architecting progressive single-page applications using little more than a couple of CSS tricks, less than 0.5 KB of JavaScript and, importantly, some static HTML. It is not a perfect or complete solution, but it testifies to the notion that performant, robust and indexable single-page applications are achievable: You can embrace web standards while reaping the benefits of sharing data and functionality between different interface screens on a single web page. Read more…

December 18, 2015 — Today we are glad to release a beautiful set of icons designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko from Minsk, Belarus, and released for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all of them for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything! As long as you don’t resell bundles of the illustrations, you can use the illustrations for anything you need. A sincere thank you to NastiFunny (Anastasia Kolisnichenko) for releasing the illustrations. Read more…

December 18, 2015 — 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 16, 2015 — Clip paths open up a wide array of exciting possibilities. Understanding the simple mechanics and how everything moves relative to each other can help you create some powerful and captivating interactions for your users. In this article, Dennis Gaebel Jr explains the difference between an SVG clipPath and a CSS clip-path, including examples to guide and inform you through this journey. Finally, he’ll share a few demos both personal and in the wild to help you better understand clipPath animation and inspire your visions. Read more…

December 16, 2015 — The state of passwords today causes more headache than happiness. Nearly half of Americans have had their account hacked in the last year alone. Are web designers and developers taking enough measures to prevent these problems? Or do we need to rethink passwords? Passphrases are a better alternative because they are more secure and usable. A few websites out there enforce passphrases. No user should feel like they’ve lost their keys or had their house broken into. But switching to passphrases doesn’t require a technical overhaul. It’s as simple as introducing the concept to users and requiring a higher character length. Read more…

December 14, 2015 — Many developers are unsure which tool is best for creating layouts for their websites. Some feel that Flexbox is powerful enough to handle all of their layout problems. However, they are unsure whether to learn it because of its confusing syntax. Others feel that Susy is much simpler and prefer its simplicity to Flexbox. So, which is more powerful, Flexbox or Susy? Is it possible to use both Flexbox and Susy at the same time? In this article, Zell Liew will find out! Read more…

December 12, 2015 — Rodney Rehm understood that ARIA could help him write web applications without having to bike-shed class names for various states. You can care about accessibility issues without being affected by a disability yourself. In many ways, making your apps and sites accessible benefits everyone. ally.js helps you accomplish that. ally.js is positioning itself as a center for collaborating on accessibility-related features, by providing low-level tools to other libraries and frameworks as well as high-level functions to developers. If you start working together you might just get somewhere! Read more…