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…

January 22, 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 21, 2016 — WordPress does make it really easily to completely customize a website. Unfortunately, any modifications made to a theme will be lost once the theme is updated by the developer — which is also bad for security. A much better idea is to use a child theme. This allows you to make any number of changes to a website without touching any of the original theme files. In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will take a detailed look at what WordPress child themes are, how to create them and how to use them to customize your website — the right way. Read more…

January 20, 2016 — In this article, Becky White will try to point out how you could avoid common pitfalls through UX considerations such as the variety of ways you can usability test with children, when and how to use non–digital prototyping, why you shouldn’t forget about adults, or when to incorporate audio/visual feedback. It’s not just taking grown–up content and dumbing it down. In fact, there are many reasons why designing for kids is actually more difficult than designing for adults. Read more…

January 19, 2016 — JavaScript developers faced a great revolution with Node.js, by allowing them to write code that runs directly on their machines. They started to easily write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in their development cycles. npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving them quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which they install on their machines to access from wherever they are in their system. Make the most out of it Installing packages from npm globally. Read more…

January 18, 2016 — Developers have no reason not to explore Client Hints. The key benefits are more maintainable responsive image tags, fewer image bytes transferred and, ultimately, happier end users. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will focus on how to address responsive images issues, with a little help from the web server and Client Hints, the new way for the browser to request images with specific properties. Read more…