March 31, 2015 — Responsive design is a default these days, but we are all still figuring out just the right process and techniques to better craft responsive websites. That’s why we created a new book — to gather practical techniques and strategies from people who have learned how to get things done right. Our brand new *Smashing Book 5, *neatly packed in a gorgeous hardcover, covers time-saving, practical techniques for crafting fast, maintainable and scalable responsive websites. Just like all of our Smashing Books, the book isn’t concerned with trends or short-lived workarounds. It focuses on the actual design process. Read more…

March 31, 2015 — As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for April 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! We are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. Read more…

March 30, 2015 — In this article, David Tucker will walk you through a messaging application demo powered by the Kinvey application and explore how to leverage user management, file storage and the data store. Through this process, you will complete the core of Kinvey interactions for the application. In the second part of this article, David will explore the permissions model in Kinvey, as well as the business logic functionality provided by the platform. Read more…

March 27, 2015 — Bugs erode trust, which in turn loses customers. So when Ben Gremillion began updating Foundation, a responsive CSS framework, he wanted to ensure everything worked. In this article Ben will teach you his methodology for testing responsively, not just on a case by case, page-from-PSD comp. He developed a certain system to make sure that nothing’s broken at launch on different devices. It’s not enough to look for blatant bugs. You have to be thorough: in execution, in accountability, and in direction. Read more…

March 25, 2015 — Toward the end of 2014, a Google spokesperson hinted that the mobile user experience would become a ranking factor. In January 2015, a number of website owners received messages warning about mobile usability issues on their websites, linking to a section of Webmaster Tools where they could review the problems. In this article, Tim Jensen will review how to flag mobile issues in Webmaster Tools, explain the most common issues and show you how to assess mobile usability problems on your website based on these flags. Read more…

March 24, 2015 — While you might have created the best content in the world, you don’t get to choose how users access it. That’s why it’s important to make sure your content works beautifully on every platform and device. While there’s no magic bullet to make sure your content is publishable and useful on every device, you can change the way you think about, plan for and create content so that it can go anywhere it needs to go. In this article, Kerry Crawford will cover some of the things you can do to make your content more flexible and accessible. Read more…

March 20, 2015 — You have likely experienced the 300-millisecond delay in mobile browsers or wrestled with touchmove versus scrolling. Certain events that used to be very clear are now filled with ambiguity. The click event used to mean one thing and one thing only, but touchscreens have complicated it by needing to discern whether the action is a double-click, scroll, event or some other OS-level gesture. In this article Dustan Kasten will introduce the event cascade and use this knowledge to implement a demo of a tap event that supports the many input methods while not breaking in proxy browsers such as Opera Mini. Read more…

March 19, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a quite unique icon set. The goodie contains 92 icons in three editable variants: outlined, filled & colored, covering 15 wide categories. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. Read more…

March 17, 2015 — Using SVGs can reduce the number of HTTP requests for image replacement. it’s also easy to make an SVG scalable to its container for responsive development. In this article Sarah Drasner will cover a few ways of using SVG sprites to describe motion on the web. She’ll show some techniques for using SVG sprites in complex animation that takes advantage of these factors. All examples shown will assume the use of an auto-prefixer and some basic knowledge of CSS animations. Read more…

March 16, 2015 — Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information. Armed with this understanding, accessibility becomes a cold, hard technical challenge. How do assistive technologies present a web application to make it accessible for their users? Where do they get the information they need? One of the keys is a technology known as the accessibility API. Read more…