Category: Design

In modern front-end development, developers should aim to write CSS which is scalable and maintainable. Otherwise, they risk losing control over specifics such as the cascade and selector specificity as the codebase grows and more developers contribute.
One way this can be achieved is through the use of methodologies such as Object-Oriented CSS (OOCSS), which rather than organizing CSS around page context, encourages separating structure (grid systems, spacing, widths, etc.) from decoration (fonts, brand, colors, etc.

We have edited and prepared the video from SmashingConf Toronto, and it is all now live for you to watch and learn from. To get a feel for the event, watch our compilation. We think that it really captures the atmosphere of a SmashingConf!
Day One The Day One Collaborative Doc created by attendees is full of takeaways from the first day of the conference. You might find some of those notes helpful as you watch the video linked below.

When you work in design for any length of time, forming habits is natural. It’s not unusual to follow a predictable process or use familiar patterns. This repetition can be fabulous for your productivity, but when each design looks much like your last, you can quickly begin to feel jaded. Staying curious is the best remedy for that feeling.
After running a small studio for eighteen years, my fatigue had become overwhelming.

Ionic has recently added support for React; so now, React developers can get the advantages of Ionic to build hybrid mobile apps and progressive web apps (PWAs). In this post, we’ll show you how to get started using Ionic with React by building a simple demo app from scratch.
Prerequisites In order to properly follow this tutorial, you’ll need the following prerequisites:
recent versions of Node.js and npm installed on your system, working knowledge of TypeScript and React.

This is not an article about the practical or creative application of this property. Instead, I want to demonstrate why understanding writing modes is so important — even to those of us who rarely need to change the writing mode of a page or component. The support of multiple writing modes is key to the way that our new layout methods of Flexbox and Grid Layout have been designed. Understanding this can unlock a better understanding of how these layout methods work.

Customer loyalty is a critical component in the success of any business. In some cases, loyalty can be earned by providing a high-quality service and dedicated support. In other cases, customers expect more from a business than just the products or services they put before them.
So, don’t be surprised when clients ask you to design a loyalty app for them.
Loyalty programs are a great way to dish out rewards to the most loyal base of customers while also giving them a reason to stay engaged with a brand.

It’s embarrassing to admit — particularly as I host a podcast about this very subject — but I dramatically dropped the ball when it came to booking in projects for this past spring. It just suddenly happened. I was finishing up two major contracts and had the next one in the pipeline. Then out of the blue that client postponed indefinitely and my two big contracts finished and I was left with no work — nothing, zip, zilch.

This two-part series presents three projects that teach you how to use AWS (Amazon Web Services) to transform text between its written and spoken states. The first project will use text to speech to turn a blog post or other written content into a spoken .mp3 file to give more options to blind and dyslexic users of your site.
In the next article, we will embark on the return journey, from speech to text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.

(This is a sponsored article.) If you think about it, software teams are a lot like sports teams. While each team member works towards the same exact goal, the role they play and the actions they take are vastly different from one another.
Which is why it’s crucial to have a seamless way of moving the ball from one team member to another.
Unfortunately, the handoff that takes place within software teams isn’t naturally as smooth as what you see on the sports field.

Everybody loves a beautiful wallpaper to freshen up their desktops and home screens, right? So to cater for new and unique artworks on a regular basis, we embarked on our monthly wallpapers adventure nine years ago, and since then, artists and designers from all across the globe have accepted the challenge and submitted their designs to it. It wasn’t any different this time around, of course.
This post features wallpapers created for August 2019.

Back in the first part of this series, we explained why this project came to be. Namely a desire to learn how a small web application could be made in vanilla JavaScript and to get a non-designing developer working his design chops a little.
In part two we took some basic initial designs and got things up and running with some tooling and technology choices. We covered how and why parts of the design changed and the ramifications of those changes.

This article is part of a series in which I attempt to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs.
Last time, I navigated the web for a day using Internet Explorer 8. This time, I browsed the web for a day on a 50 MB budget.

Can you afford to gamble on an idea for an app or on an assumption about how consumers will respond to it? I bet your clients aren’t too comfortable doing that either, especially when it’s their money and reputation on the line.
An app can be a risky investment for a business if it’s not approached with care. Even then, the most well-researched of app concepts can lead to disappointing user download and retention rates.

The raison d’être of this adventure was to push your humble author a little in the disciplines of visual design and JavaScript coding. The functionality of the application I’d decided to build was not dissimilar to a ‘to do’ application. It is important to stress that this wasn’t an exercise in original thinking. The destination was far less important than the journey.
Want to find out how the application ended up?

For a long time, we wanted to create a printed magazine that hasn’t existed before. Not a magazine about fleeting design trends or ever-changing frameworks, but topics that would make us all think, and that would remain useful as time passes. A printed magazine exploring topics that often get lost in the myriad of blog posts out there.
About the Magazine With Smashing Magazine Print, we want to provide a space for topics that perhaps have more longevity than what we usually cover online — without running short on practical and actionable insights, of course.

The BigInt data type aims to enable JavaScript programmers to represent integer values larger than the range supported by the Number data type. The ability to represent integers with arbitrary precision is particularly important when performing mathematical operations on large integers. With BigInt, integer overflow will no longer be an issue.
Additionally, you can safely work with high-resolution timestamps, large integer IDs, and more without having to use a workaround.

Any time I start working on a new project, I ask myself, “Should I use separate git repositories for my back-end server and my front-end client(s)? What’s the best way to organize the codebase?”
I had this same question after a few months working on my personal website. I originally had all the code in the same repository: the back end used Node.js and the front end used ES6 with Pug.

To facilitate your font picking and pairing process, I’ve included examples of how these typefaces have been put to use recently, as well as a few pairing ideas. Enjoy and don’t forget to ping me on Twitter to show me how you’ve used them — I’d love to see it!
Gangster Grotesk Designed by Adrien Midzic, Gangster Grotesk is a contemporary grotesque with angled terminal strokes that slightly curve inward. Because of these quirky individual touches, the typeface brings a unique flavor to headlines and posters when used at large sizes.

Web scraping is a way to grab data from websites without needing access to APIs or the website’s database. You only need access to the site’s data — as long as your browser can access the data, you will be able to scrape it.
Realistically, most of the time you could just go through a website manually and grab the data ‘by hand’ using copy and paste, but in a lot of cases that would take you many hours of manual work, which could end up costing you a lot more than the data is worth, especially if you’ve hired someone to do the task for you.