December 13, 2017 — 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…

December 12, 2017 — 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…

December 11, 2017 — 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…

December 8, 2017 — The way many of us create content-driven websites isn’t quite optimal, and we need to do something about it. When designing a website, it’s important to focus on better understanding the folks who will visit the website. If you haven’t allowed user feedback to influence the design and content of your website, then it’s probably time you did. Paul Boag explains why. Read more…

December 7, 2017 — There are a good number of benefits and reasons why you should consider integrating design workouts into your team. In this article, Arturas Leonovas shares some exercises which are worth trying out with your design team and get you all to train before the big game — together. Doing this at least once a month is a fun way for everyone to polish skills that they use every day. Not only that, the added benefit of team-building and knowledge-sharing will help everyone become the best versions of themselves. Read more…

December 7, 2017 — Integrating prototyping deeply into your creative process can be transformative. It can make for a more positive, enriching team culture. In this article, Jamie shares his experiences and advice on how prototyping can help you work on a wider variety of projects much faster. He’ll provide some prototypes that he created for a game he made, Melody Jams, which got featured by Apple in 130 countries and was the number one kids app in the store for a brief time. Read more…

December 6, 2017 — (This series of articles is kindly supported by Adobe.) User Experience (UX) is evolving rapidly, and as designers, we need to ensure our knowledge keeps pace with the changes. This article, the first in a series of ten sponsored by Adobe XD, gets the ball rolling, exploring how UX is evolving. Read more…

December 5, 2017 — As software designers, your work deserves to be protected as much as any other author’s does. Thanks to headlines featuring big companies like Google and Oracle, copyright law is an often-discussed but frequently-misunderstood topic. This article was created specifically with software developers and designers in mind. Though this article Kimberly Bond will provide an overview, perhaps this information will be helpful to those of you who work each day to create and improve the software programs that enrich our lives. Read more…

December 4, 2017 — Building a mobile app usually costs a lot of money and takes months to launch. Well, there’s a fast and more simple way to create your own native app. In this article, Nick Babich explains how you can use Dropsource (a free visual platform for building mobile apps) by creating an Android app for a chain of restaurants. Read more…

December 4, 2017 — In this article, Huijing Chen covers known and obscure features of Firefox DevTools that can come in handy when you’re building and debugging CSS Grid layouts. You may have heard quite a bit of talk about a CSS feature called “Grid” this year. If you are someone who cringes when you hear the words “CSS” and “grid” in the same sentence, then I highly suggest you check out this new CSS module called CSS Grid. Read more…