What better way could there be to celebrate the last few weeks and the upcoming holiday season as with some cheerful wallpapers? To get you in the right mood for December and the upcoming holiday season, artists and designers from across the globe once again got their creative ideas bubbling and created festive and inspiring desktop wallpapers for you. Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd and that are bound to add some holiday cheer to your screen. You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
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Building your own app really gives you the ability to create anything you can imagine. If you are a designer, surely you have seen plenty of designs that are not perfect, and you should feel OK with your app’s design not being perfect too. You have to start somewhere, and with the help of other designers and developers, you will improve. In this tutorial, Craig Clayton is going to look at one page of an existing app and teach you how to get the design into Xcode. The design for this app was done using an app called Sketch. Sketch allows you to design anything from websites to mobile apps. It is my preference for designing mobile apps.
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Conversations about ethics are often difficult and awkward. Nevertheless, designers can play a vital role in finding new ways for people to relate to and communicate with each other. In this article, Ciara and Samantha set out to understand how ethics is used in contemporary design.
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Users couldn’t care less about whether a technology is native, an installed web app or a website. What makes users engage and makes shoppers convert is really the experience itself. In this article, Mitch Lenton takes a closer look at PWAs on Android devices and explains how we can pave the way for a new era of browserless web browsing.
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Creating inclusive experiences is a question of using the right menu patterns in the right places, with the right markup and behavior. In design, we often make the mistake of giving different things the same name. They appear similar, but appearances can be deceptive. In terms of inclusion, it may lead you to repurpose a semantically and behaviorally inappropriate component. Users will expect one thing and get another. In this article, Heydon Pickering will give you an insight into inclusive menus and menu buttons.
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This article is a part of the series about how we work and design and build and play. Today is the day when everything changes. Meet Smashing Membership, a community effort dedicated to support and highlight new and old voices of the community side by side. And you can be a part of it. A safe, friendly place where together we can share, learn and decide on the future of the web. But also an effort to move away from an ad-ridden, noisy, clicks-driven web to a friendlier, cleaner and calmer place.
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Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann summarizes what happened in the web community in the past few weeks in one handy list, so that you can catch up on everything new and important. Enjoy!
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How do you come up with your list of supported browsers? Why would you force a bunch of JavaScript onto those devices? The question of browser support has to be addressed when using any new CSS. In this article, Rachel Andrew will explore approaches to dealing with browser support today. What are the practical things we can do to allow us to use new CSS now and still give a great experience to the browsers that don’t support it?
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