So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays. In this article, Christian Holst will explore how e-commerce designers could use responsive upscaling to craft a tailored experience for users with big screens. He’ll cover one core principle, along with 11 ideas for upscaling different parts of the e-commerce experience to deal with the various usability challenges observed during our e-commerce usability studies.
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Looking for a starting point for designing emails? Not sure which font size to use? In this article, Anna Yeaman explores how email designers handle responsive typography within various industries, so she amassed 50 emails across various industries that she thinks do a good job with typography to see if any patterns emerged. This study provides a decent starting point for designing emails. The proportional relationships, the guideline to build out a custom responsive type scale that adjusts across viewports and some basic guidelines such as fluid line heights have proven the most useful.
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Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything that’s happening in the industry so you don’t have to. Starting from today, we are happy and honored to feature a bi-monthly web development reading list here on Smashing Magazine. Now it should be a bit easier to stay up to date! Welcome to the one hundredth edition and the first one to appear on Smashing Magazine. Anselm is very happy to keep you up to date with the web development industry. If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments or write him an email.
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Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough. As the number of mobile users grows, new apps pop up daily. To make yours a success, be strategic about how you design the “shop window” for your app — the app’s page. A/B testing and optimization of the icon, screenshots and video preview will give you a better chance of higher conversions, a higher volume of organic downloads and a better return on your investment in user acquisition.
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The future of web layout is bright, thanks to flexbox. The CSS layout mechanism lets us arrange elements in a truly web-like way. Some elements can be fixed, while others scroll. The order in which they appear can be independent of the source order. And everything can fit a range of screen sizes. Yep, it’s a great time to jump into flexbox if you haven’t done so yet. But flexbox has a dizzying array of features, and in this article, Ben Gremillion will take a look at how you could create a basic Gmail-like, flexbox-based interface. If you haven’t explored or fully understood flexbox yet, this piece will revisit and explain a few things that might be confusing at first.
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There are around 100 web conferences in the UK every year. The picture across the rest of Europe looks just as abundant, with at least half a dozen conferences in every major city from Berlin to Barcelona. At the same time, smaller towns like Malmö, Faenza and Freiburg have become surprise hubs. Today’s conferences have moved away from the simple dissemination of information to become experiences in their own right. Often the people and location have become more important than the talks themselves. As such, the choices seem endless and picking the right conference can be a challenge — but it hasn’t always been that way.
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Most of the time, we develop websites without understanding what the browser is actually doing under the hood. How exactly does the browser render our web pages from the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that we create? Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can be very helpful when trying to profile a web page and find areas for improvement. You simply enter the URL of the page that you want to test, and the tool provides you with a list of performance suggestions. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simpler than it seems! The answer lies in the way that the CSS and JavaScript are loaded in your web page.
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In this tutorial, Matthew Ray will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides. While you always have the option to use the WordPress Subversion repository, there may be instances where you prefer to host a plugin yourself. Perhaps you are offering your users a premium plugin. Maybe you need a way to keep your client’s code in sync across multiple sites. It could simply be that you want to use a Git workflow instead of Subversion. After reading this, you should be able to update your plugin by clicking the “Update now” button on the plugins page!
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As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite. In this article Trine Falbe will give you some insights about what kids are like from the psychological point of view, and how this affects the way they use the web. She’ll also cover practical design guidelines to create better web stuff for kids. We should be the ones who make sure that the kinds of things that go on in apps like Talking Tom and The Smurfs’ Village don’t become the norm. Designing with respect should be our norm.
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It’s no secret that the crowdfunding industry is booming. It seems like every day you hear about an exciting new startup crushing their campaign goals and launching their company via Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Up to this point most software startups have failed to take advantage of this growing movement. In this article Matt Ward will cover the highs and lows of app-based crowdfunding, the purpose being to shed light on common software flaws seen in crowdfunding to ideally help your campaigns prosper. And whether you choose to use crowdfunding to jump-start your startup or not, many of the following concepts go well beyond initial launch-stage success.
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