Rendering and interaction have become a lot more consistent across browsers in recent years. It’s still not perfectly uniform, however, and a lot of small issues can trip you up. A list of common issues along with their solutions. | Continue reading
Without the right framework and tools, the debugging process can be a nightmare. In this article, Akhil Labudubariki walks through a number of steps and considerations his team made when developing their own in-house Central Logging Service (CLS) tool. | Continue reading
Ever heard of a text adventure? If you’re old enough (like me!), then you’ve probably heard about them or even played them back in the day. In this article, I’m going to show you the process through which I go when creating, not a single text adventure, but a whole engine capable … | Continue reading
An old cliché says that “may you get everything you wish for” makes for a particularly insidious curse. With Edge soon making the switch to Chrome’s rendering engine — well, for better or worse, a bitter wish is coming true. | Continue reading
A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. Chris Ashton experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help. | Continue reading
Building real-time applications is hard. However, GraphQL is rapidly upending this status-quo. Let’s explore what GraphQL is, and then take it for a spin by building a poll app. | Continue reading
Someone who uses your app or website has a particular goal. Often, the one thing standing between the user and their goal is a form. Forms remain **one of the most important types of interactions** for users on the web and in apps.In fact, forms are often considered the final ste … | Continue reading
CSS Grid Level 2 is already in the process of being specified, and the main feature of this level of the spec is to bring us subgrid. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains the new features. | Continue reading
WordPress has a brand new content editor called “Gutenberg” that is going to shape WordPress for years to come. In this article, Andy Bell explains why it’s a movement and not just a new editor. | Continue reading
In this article, we’ll look at the pain points of users who are browsing old non-PWA websites and the promise of PWAs to make the web great. You’ll learn most of the important technologies that make for cool PWAs, like service workers, web push notifications and IndexedDB. | Continue reading
Using a Structured Content Management System (SCMS) can be a great way to free your content from a paradigm that begins to feel its age. In this article, Knut Melvær suggests some overarching strategies, with some concrete real-world examples on how to think about working with st … | Continue reading
Have you ever had a requirement in which you had to design and build an interactive web experience but the grid system fell short? Furthermore, the design elements turned into unusual shapes that just wouldn’t fit into the regular web layouts? In this article, we’re going to buil … | Continue reading
A 404 page should do more than apologize for poor navigation on behalf of your website. Here’s why making an effort with a 404 page could better your website’s chances of people coming back despite the inconvenience, and how to track those errors to reduce how often people see i … | Continue reading
What does Gutenberg bring to the future of WordPress? In this article, Leonardo Losoviz shares a number of implications of building sites through a component-based architecture (as the concept) and through Gutenberg (as the implementation), including what new functionalities it c … | Continue reading
Have you ever considered whether CSS Grid can actually replace the need for CSS frameworks or third-party component libraries? In doing so, Rachel Andrew discovered a range of reasons people use a third-party framework and the positive and negative things about doing so. | Continue reading
Vertical rhythm is clearly an important part of Web design, yet on the subject of baseline, our community seems divided and there is no consensus as to how it fits in — if at all — with our growing and evolving toolkit for designing online. | Continue reading
The Server Timing header provides a discrete and convenient way to communicate backend server performance timings to developer tools in the browser. Adding timing information to your application enables you to monitor back-end and front-end performance all in one place. | Continue reading
With the marketshare of evergreen browsers rising fast and browsers launching support for new features in lockstep, is it time we rethink asset delivery for the modern web? | Continue reading
In this final article of the series, we wrap up by taking a look at some of the common uses for Flexbox. What should we use Flexbox for, and what it is not so good at? | Continue reading
This pairing of talks from 2018 SmashingConfs will help you to assess the third party scripts you might be considering adding to a site. Taking into account business goals, user experience and performance you can make good decisions about what to include and how to do it. | Continue reading
With the help of this article, you will finally be able to learn the basics of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Simple Email Service (SES) APIs to help you build your own static site mailer on the Serverless Framework. Let’s get started! | Continue reading
Handwritten text shows a personal side of its author, a side that is not easy to put into words and that contrasts with the standardized look of digital communication. This contrast and “aura” is perhaps **what makes handwriting fonts so popular**. As a typographer, I love handwr … | Continue reading
Collaborating on office documents is a solved problem. Collaborating on code is still a pretty difficult thing to do. That’s because sharing just code isn’t enough. In order to really collaborate, a developer needs to be able to share their whole environment. VS Live Share is a n … | Continue reading
Users can be hesitant to fill out forms. That is why it is our goal as designers to make the process of filling out a form as easy as possible. In this article, I’ll share a number of practical techniques that are bound to help you design effective forms. | Continue reading
Onboarding is a real challenge as it can be complex, involving the user entering personal information. Let's take a closer look at how we can help users to sign up, onboard, and pay for your product. | Continue reading
In Google’s never-ending journey to make the web a mobile-friendly place, we now have even greater insights into the four key reasons why consumers reach for their mobile devices. These are known as micro-moments, and this post aims to teach you how to design for micro-moments to … | Continue reading
We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine. In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. | Continue reading
The Beacon API is a lightweight and efficient way to log information from a web page back to a server. Find out how that can be used and what makes it so different from traditional Ajax techniques. | Continue reading
We asked the Smashing Community for their favorite tips and tricks when editing text and code. With so many great suggestions, we've decided to collect them all into one article so you can add it to your useful bookmarks. | Continue reading
What could be so difficult about designing a **decent date picker**? Basically, we just need an input field and an icon that represents a calendar clearly enough, and once the user clicks on that icon, we pop up a little overlay with the days lined up in rows. Right?Well, not eve … | Continue reading
Do you know Redux's real power is beyond managing the state? As designers, if we understand the advantages and downsides of Redux, we'll be able to contribute to this decision making from the perspective of design. | Continue reading
Many of us are taught to make sure our sites can be used via keyboard. Why is that, and what is it like in practice? Chris Ashton did an experiment to find out. | Continue reading
When sending transactional emails, you may be missing out on some of the more advanced best practices without even knowing it. This guide will help you make sure that you haven’t overlooked anything. | Continue reading
If you’ve been looking for a list of email newsletters dedicated to web designers and developers, we’ve got one that is bound to help you keep up with the industry — the most useful news and resources sent directly to your email inbox. | Continue reading
The placeholder attribute contains a surprising amount of issues that prevent it from delivering on what it promises. Let’s clarify why you need to stop using it. | Continue reading
React and D3.js are great tools to help us deal with the DOM and its challenges. They can surely work together, and we are empowered to choose where to draw the line between them. | Continue reading
As designers and developers, we have an obligation to build experiences that are better than the norm. This article explains how unethical design happens, and how to do ethical design through a set of best practices. | Continue reading
As the size of data for each message in our system differs from a few bytes to up to 100MB, we needed a scalable solution that could support a multitude of scenarios. In this article, Dhimil Gosalia explains why you should consider building an in-house Pub/Sub service, too. | Continue reading
To succeed in the modern market, companies need to do more than produce an excellent product or provide reliable service: They need to turn their faithful users into advocates. Let's find out how. | Continue reading
Node is a very versatile platform, but one of the predominant applications is creating networked processes. In this article, we’re going to focus on profiling the most common of these: HTTP web servers. | Continue reading
Did you know that you can incorporate Vue into your project the same way that you would incorporate jQuery — with no build step necessary? Let's cover some common use cases in jQuery and how we can switch them over to Vue, and why we’d even want to do so. | Continue reading
Whether you’re fairly new to CSS or an experienced developer from elsewhere in the stack who wants to make sure your understanding of layout today is up to date, this guide covers everything you need to know about CSS Layout today. | Continue reading
In some ways, we are all still so new to CSS Grid Layout. A lot of folks keep asking about best practices that are available out there. Rachel Andrew ran a survey and shares the results as well as her thoughts in this article. | Continue reading
Let’s take a look at how to shape the interactivity of SVG images — that is, control which parts of the document can receive clicks, touches, or taps — using the `pointer-events` property. | Continue reading
Today, the design landscape has changed completely. We’re equipped with new and powerful tools — CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, CSS shapes and CSS writing-mode, to name a few — that we can use to exercise our creativity. Zell Liew explains how. | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered whether it's possible to do anything on the web without JavaScript? How many sites use progressive enhancement in practice? Chris Ashton did an experiment to find out. | Continue reading
Recently, there has been a proliferation of virtual reality (VR) web browsers and VR capabilities added to traditional browsers. In this article, we’ll look at the state of browsers in VR and the state of VR on the web via the WebVR APIs. | Continue reading