December 31, 2015 — The new year is an occasion to start things fresh, to rethink current practices and habits. So why not start small? Clean up your desktop and give it an inspiring new background. We might have something for you: desktop wallpapers created by artists and designers from across the globe as a part of our monthly desktop wallpapers challenge. Read more…

December 30, 2015 — In this article, Patrick Brosset takes a walk through some of the main tools and differential features of Firefox Developer Edition. He explores how this browser can be used to keep updated about the latest tools for CSS features and animations, testing website displays and some tips and tricks for developers and designers. Firefox’s DevTools have evolved quite rapidly in recent years, and feature-packed versions are now getting released every six weeks. The project is being driven by an active community, which you can be a part of! Feel free to download Firefox Developer Edition to try out the latest version of the tools. Read more…

December 30, 2015 — Ideas begin with a small team of creative people at the heart of the company who communicate easily with each other. In this article, Dave Schools will talk about the six design principles inspired by the world’s greatest product designers and how they apply to 15 products using the steps of the product design test, such as immediate intuition, form and color agreement, approachable innovation, and replicable methodology. As you get accustomed to applying these design principles, you’ll be surprised by how your mind picks up on small things to appreciate, or to change, in the products you encounter every day. Read more…

December 29, 2015 — In 2010, back in the time when we started searching for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine, we launched the monthly wallpaper series. Since then, we’ve had remarkable desktop wallpapers designed by various artists from all around the globe. It would be our pleasure, dear readers, for you to share your artworks with all of us and we heartily welcome you to join in the monthly wallpaper submissions here on Smashing Magazine! Feel free to design bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but creative, unusual and absolutely stunning wallpapers. Read more…

December 28, 2015 — In this article, Ilya Zayats will show you that, from React’s perspective, there is no difference at all in what to render. React helps to organize an application into small, human-digestible chunks. You can avoid any complex internal interactions between small components, while your application continues to be blazingly fast due to the DOM-diffing that React does under the hood. Trying to grasp what’s wrong with a graph or visualization just by looking at SVG generator templates is often overwhelming, and attempts to maintain internal structure or separation of concerns are often complex and tedious. So, can we apply the same techniques to web graphics — SVG in particular? Yes! Read more…

December 24, 2015 — Employing the functionality under the constraints of a large CMS like WordPress, can be very difficult to do, since the growing adoption of responsive images cannot be ignored. Thankfully, with the launch of WordPress 4.4, theme developers and maintainers will find it much easier to introduce responsive image functionality into their themes. In this article, Tim Evko will take a look at how the feature works, and how you can use it to get the best support for your WordPress site. Read more…

December 24, 2015 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

December 23, 2015 — Every web professional is different. Practices such as turning off email at key times during the day to avoid distractions, taking weekend and vacation time for himself and avoiding filling that time with more work, or attending to professional conferences to keep the passion for web design going, worked wonders for Jeremy Girard’s own productivity. Like many web professionals, his first instinct was to work longer hours – to come into the office early, stay late, and to give up some of his own weekend time. While this certainly helped him get more work done, he quickly realized it was not something he could sustain without eventually burning out. Read more…

December 23, 2015 — By focusing almost exclusively on the user insights that each test is designed to yield, prototype testing can be an impressively efficient method for product teams to run experiments. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it. In this article, Michelle Chu gives six tips for designers to consider when creating prototypes specifically to generate user testing insight. Read more…

December 21, 2015 — Single-page applications tend to take the form of runtimes, JavaScript executables deployed like popup shops into vacant  elements. In this article, Heydon Pickering will introduce a solution for architecting progressive single-page applications using little more than a couple of CSS tricks, less than 0.5 KB of JavaScript and, importantly, some static HTML. It is not a perfect or complete solution, but it testifies to the notion that performant, robust and indexable single-page applications are achievable: You can embrace web standards while reaping the benefits of sharing data and functionality between different interface screens on a single web page. Read more…