February 3, 2015 — This time we decided to turn our mystery riddle into an exercise of patience and stubbornness — beyond problem solving, of course. To achieve just that, we had to hide the right answers properly and provide subtle hints that attentive readers would need to discover first. So, what if we looked closely at the things around us and introduced a riddle that would reflect those experiences? Read more…

January 31, 2015 — As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for February 2015. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for almost seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

January 30, 2015 — Something interactive will almost always communicate more than a picture ever could, and you’ll have better conversations because of it. On the other hand, Sketch is an excellent UI design tool, lightweight and quite powerful, and it works great with Flinto, InVision and the like because they live in the borderlands of flat images and HTML or native code. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will talk you through why you should prototype and how you can do it with Sketch and prototyping tools such as Flinto and InVision. He’ll also get a nicely documented freebie Sketch file to help you. Read more…

January 29, 2015 — The diffusion of innovations is a complex process; design teams can use their knowledge of the theory to create a road map for how they will address critical factors in the design and marketing of their product. In this second part, Victor Yocco presents the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use. According to the diffusion of innovations theory, how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people’s long-term adoption of an innovation. Design teams can address many components of these characteristics. Read more…

January 28, 2015 — The Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC 2015, we’ve prepared a new mystery riddle, and this one will be an exercise in patience and stubborness. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden Twitter hashtag. Your job is to discover those hashtags as fast as possible. If your guess for a hashtag is right, search for that hashtag on Twitter and you’ll find a tweet leading you to the next level. Are you ready? Action! Read more…

January 26, 2015 — Spartan is a project that has been in the making for some time now. It will be a matter of few months until users and developers alike will be able to try Spartan for themselves, but we can share some of the interesting bits already today. In this article, Jacob Rossi will cover the inside story of the rendering engine powering Spartan, how it came to be, and how 20 years of the Internet Explorer platform (Trident) has helped inform how it was designed. Read more…

January 23, 2015 — Producing creative, fresh projects is the key to standing out. Unique side projects are the best place to innovate, but balancing commercially and creatively lucrative work is tricky. In this article, Danny Bluestone will look at how to make side projects work and why they’re worthwhile, drawing on lessons learned from our development of the UX Companion app. Many of the tips covered in this article share some common ground — if you manage your side projects with as much professionalism as you manage client projects, then you’re likely to succeed. Achieving the perfect balance with client work isn’t easy, but we’re confident that following these lessons will be great for your next project, and hopefully they’ll help you on your way. Read more…

January 22, 2015 — When approaching AngularJS for the first time, the interaction between scopes, directives and controllers is what immediately becomes (and remains) confusing for most. After the confusion sets in, you start learning about the advanced concepts, which are mind-blowingly complex as well. In this article, Nicolas Bevacqua will navigate the salt marsh that is AngularJS scopes and the lifecycle of an AngularJS application, while providing an amusingly informative, in-depth read. Read more…

January 21, 2015 — Users don’t automatically or simultaneously accept even the best ideas and most useful technologies. Acceptance and adoption happens in stages, and in order to stick, it has to happen the right way. In this two-part series of articles, Victor Yocco will explore the application of the diffusion of innovations to digital design and will provide examples of how design teams can account for these principles. In this part, he will give a basic overview of the theory and then discuss two main components of the theory: the different types of adopters, and the key steps in the process of adoption. Read more…

January 20, 2015 — As developers and designers it’s our job to make the web welcoming, not overwhelming. The HTML5 Page Visibility API is used effectively in recent projects by Active Theory, such as their work for Under Armor and A Spacecraft For All: click to another tab and you’ll find that the multimedia presentation pauses and the music fades away. This behavior typifies what I like to call the “polite web”: sites that are considerate of users’ attention, bandwidth and abilities. Read more…