December 11, 2012 — The shortcode ability of WordPress is extremely underrated. It enables the end user to create intricate elements with a few keystrokes while also modularizing editing tasks. This tutorial is for experienced WordPress users; we will be looking at the widgets object and shortcodes. Read more…

December 10, 2012 — The latest version of Safari doesn’t make such great strides as the previous update did, but there are some tools in there which will be of use or interest to developers. These include: File upload, Web audio, CSS images, and more. Read more…

December 10, 2012 — This article covers the fundamental concepts for utilizing smart device technologies and sensor data in order to understand context and introduce “adaptive thinking” into the UX professional’s toolset. The author demonstrates the importance of context when designing adaptive experiences and gives ideas on how to design adaptive systems. Read more…

December 8, 2012 — We published the article “Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away” in which Alastair Johnston discussed the evolution of Helvetica, the reasons for its popularity as well as his thoughts on why designers should start questioning the usefulness of Helvetica in their projects. Hours later Indra Kupferschmid published an article in which she corrected some of the facts presented in the original article. We republish Indra’s article to correct the factual errors, with her permission of course. Read more…

December 7, 2012 — In September 2012 we ran the very first Smashing Conference — friendly, valuable and inspiring community event — in a beautiful medieval building in our home town Freiburg, Germany. The conference was a huge success, and we haven’t anticipated the fantastic feedback we’ve received during and after the event. Read more…

December 7, 2012 — Most typeface designs are the result of fashion or changes in taste; some are technologically driven. For Helvetica, an explanation of its history helps to explain its longevity. Read more…

December 5, 2012 — WordPress makes it easy for people to publish a blog or website; it democratizes Web publishing. In this post, Siobhan McKeown takes a look at how you can be a top WordPress professional. This advice could apply to developers, but equally to bloggers, support reps, designers and everyone in between. Read more…

December 5, 2012 — Although templates can be used to output any kind of text, in this article we provide examples using HTML, since that is what we want in client-side development. Let’s take a fresh look at client-side templating! Read more…

December 4, 2012 — The difficulty faced by interaction designers and user experience designers is that they have to consider, balance and combine measurable and non-measurable dimensions of user experience to create the best possible product. Fitts’s Law tries to help user interface designers by giving them easily quantifiable, mathematically accurate values to base their design decisions on. Read more…

December 3, 2012 — When building an app for iOS, you have to provide the normal-sized and double-sized images for each graphic. This is where the strongest Adobe Fireworks feature comes in. In this article, Ivo Mynttinen describes how to design an iOS app with Adobe Fireworks for the iPhone and shows a few techniques which allow you to design faster, achieving the best possible results. Read more…