CategoryBest Practices

June 3, 2025 — Designers love to craft, but polishing pixels before the problem is solved is a time-sink. This article pinpoints the five traps that lure us into premature detail — being afraid to show rough work, fixing symptoms instead of causes, solving the wrong problem, drowning in unactionable feedback, and plain fatigue — then hands you a four-step rescue plan to refocus on goals, ship faster, and keep your craft where it counts. Read more…

May 23, 2025 — Road-tripping along the line between engineering and spirituality, Robert M. Pirsig’s musings on the arts, sciences, and Quality ring as true now as they ever have. Read more…

May 23, 2024 — How can we get better at naming? This post is dedicated to naming conventions, tips, and real-world examples that help you name things in a robust and flexible way. Read more…

January 29, 2024 — Most product teams commonly adopt a feature-centric mindset, finding them convenient for brainstorming, drafting requirement documents, and integrating into backlogs and ticketing systems. In this article, Andy Budd shows how fixation with features might be holding you back and how making a few small tweaks to your process could make an entire world of difference. Read more…

November 13, 2023 — Words alone aren’t enough to safeguard best practices in the world of web design and development. Web design documentation must be like its medium — interactive and constantly evolving. Read more…

July 7, 2022 — Using a data visualization case study, we will explore how an accessibility-first approach led us down the path of creating a better visual design for charts. Throughout the article, we will highlight how we used the seemingly constraining Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG) to become an empowering factor in our design process. We will also discuss how this approach led us to an unexpected yet better outcome for everyone. Read more…

December 6, 2021 — There are so many websites out there that have not considered the overall usability of their visually impaired users. When it comes to designing better links and sending better emails, Slava Shestopalov has a few tips on how to improve your website’s experience while accessibility in mind. Read more…

July 14, 2021 — Too often the filtering experience on the web is broken and frustrating, making it just unnecessarily difficult for customers to get to that shiny comfortable range of relevant results. When designing the next filter, take a look at some of the common issues that you might want to avoid, and hopefully avoid all the frustration that comes from broken and inaccessible implementations. Read more…

June 10, 2021 — We don’t need to write everything from scratch every single time. With boilerplates and starter kits, we can set up our projects faster, and get to work immediately. We’ve also just recently covered CSS auditing tools, CSS generators, accessible front-end components and VS code extensions — you might find them useful, too.  This collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that the team at Smashing found useful and hope will make your day-to-day work more productive and efficient. Read more…

May 27, 2021 — Meet useful Visual Studio Code extensions for web developers: little helpers to minimize slow-downs and frustrations, and boost developer’s workflow along the way. Recently, we’ve also covered CSS auditing tools, CSS generators and accessible front-end components — you might find them useful, too. In this post, we look into useful VS Code extensions for front-end development, from fine productivity boosters to advanced debugging helpers. Read more…