A grid is like invisible glue that holds a design together. Even when elements are physically separated from each other, something invisible connects them together. Grids help designers to build better products by tying different design elements together to achieve effective hierarchy, alignment and consistency, with little effort. If executed properly, your designs will appear thoughtful and organized. In this article Nick Babich aims to give you a good understanding of grid systems, what they are, and how they can be applied to your design process. Understanding how to use grids will come from practical experience.
Read more…
Making improvements to your mobile app’s design isn’t necessarily the easiest of tasks. In this article, Suzanne Scacca explains the six key ways in which dating app developers successfully use design to create an engaging and addictive experience for their users. Dating apps often get a bad rap for turning the dating scene into something superficial, mechanical and impersonal. Log in through Facebook. Swipe left. Swipe right. While it’s easy to write off these apps as fun little diversions for people trying to find love, they’re actually quite successful. So, what’s their secret?
Read more…
Most potential users will want to try out the software or service before committing any time and money. Often this is where the age-old demo account comes into play. However, anyone who has ever implemented a demo account can attest to the problems associated. In this article, James Pierce brings you a solution: SQLite. It’s commonly known that SQLite does not handle multiple threads since the entire database is locked during a write command, which is one of the reasons why you should not use it in a normal production environment. However, in his solution, a separate SQLite file is used for each user demoing the software.
Read more…
You know how sometimes during one of those late conference evenings somebody brings up a seemingly ridiculous topic and then the entire conversation seems to circle around it? That’s exactly what happened at SmashingConf Freiburg when suddenly the entire conversation was about how famous books and movies could be represented in an emoji, and it turned out to be a pretty decent cliffhanger for this particular Emoji Riddle. These riddles can be quite addictive and annoying, can’t they? With seven mischievous riddles published over the last few years, we’ve learned a few lessons along the way. At this point, you might be used to endless, mischievous, tricky, mean, time-consuming and intricate Mystery Riddles, and the latest one wasn’t any different.
Read more…
What happened in the web community in the last few weeks? The web is developing and changing so fast, and we need to acknowledge that we as individual persons can’t know and understand everything. And that’s fine. Choose what you want to do, set your priorities, and, most importantly of all, don’t hesitate to hire someone else for the things you can’t do on your own. In this article, Anselm has summarized the most important happenings in the web community that have taken place over the past few weeks in one handy list for you. Enjoy!
Read more…
You really don’t want to spend hours manually testing every part of your WordPress plugin to ensure nothing is broken every time you deploy a new version — do you? In this tutorial Collins Agbonghama will teach you how to test efficiently with automated testing, and help you recognize the importance of writing tests and how to start writing one for your own WordPress plugin.
Read more…
We’re about to experience a private equity bust, or that VC’s are evil and investment will never work for your startup. Instead, entertain the thought that investment is not a silver bullet and shouldn’t be considered the ultimate goal of your new venture. There are plenty of prudent and diligent investors who can help to make your business a success, and likewise, there are many alternatives to equity capital that could work out better for you. In this article Michael Daniel will look into the chances your business has at rising to the heights of Uber and Airbnb, and explore some alternative avenues for raising capital and building your next brilliant idea.
Read more…
Links make the Internet what it is. A robust visual design is essential to making the user journey joyful. While underlining has its downsides, it remains one of the most explicit ways to indicate the presence of a link. Underlining text makes links both easy to find and easy to understand for visitors. In this article, Nick Babich will explain the concept of underlining and provide a few tips on how to use it to improve the web experience, and help you find out when and why underlines should be used in our digital products.
Read more…
To celebrate the relaunch of this little website, we’ve prepared something special yet again — a Smashing Emoji Mystery Riddle. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden key. The key is always exactly one emoji. Your job is to find these emoji as fast as possible. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the discovered emoji in one single tweet at @smashingmag.
Read more…
This article is about the Block Formatting Context (BFC). Today, Rachel Andrew will explain the existing ways to create a Block Formatting Context, why it is important in CSS layout, and show you a new method of creating one. She’ll explain what a BFC is through examples which are likely to be familiar to you, and then show you a new value of display, that really only makes sense once you understand what a BFC is and why you might need one.
Read more…
