This week at Smashing Magazine, we've decided to reflect on and analyze performance, navigation, code base, style guides, content, customer support, our tools and our internal processes — basically everything. That's why Smashing Magazine will be unusually quiet for the rest of this week.
While we’re (kind of) away this week, we’d be more than happy to leave you with a 15% discount on all of our lovely Smashing products — whether it's a Smashing Book, an eBook, the entire Smashing Library, or even a Smashing Workshop. If you’ve ever thought about picking one of these up, now is the time to do it. We'd like to express a sincere thank you for all of your support, and for following us throughout the years!
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Adaptive images are the current hot topic in conversations about adaptive and responsive Web design. Why? Because no one likes any of the solutions thus far. New elements and attributes are being discussed as a solution for what is, for most of us, a big headache: to provide every user with one image optimized for their display size and resolution, without wasting time, memory or bandwidth with a client-side solution.
We have foreground and background images. We have large and small displays. We have regular and high-resolution displays. We have high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth connections. We have portrait and landscape orientations.
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We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And 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 creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for June 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!
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Whether you offer free or premium themes, testing should be a major part of your development process. By planning in advance, you can foster a development environment that deters some bugs by design and that helps you prevent others.
The aim of this article is to share some of the tricks I use personally during and after development to achieve a bug-free product. This article is split into three distinct sections Setting up, Development phase and Final testing. This should give you a good overview of what you can do over the course of the development cycle.
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Responsive Web design has been around for some years now, and it was a hot topic in 2012. Many well-known people such as Brad Frost and Luke Wroblewski have a lot of experience with it and have helped us make huge improvements in the field. But there’s still a whole lot to do.
In this article, we will look at what is currently possible, what will be possible in the future using what are not yet standardized properties (such as CSS Level 4 and HTML5 APIS), and what still needs to be improved. This article is not exhaustive, and we won’t go deep into each technique, but you’ll have enough links and knowledge to explore further by yourself.
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With all of the different smartphones, tablets and other devices that sport various operating systems and versions thereof, a Web developer’s job — testing (sometimes virtually) on multiple devices to resolve errors — hasn’t become any simpler.
This article suggests how we can manage these tasks without pouring a truck-load of money into actually buying all of these different devices.
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Once again, it’s time to join in on a Smashing Magazine photography contest. You might remember or took part in our popular Coffee Mug Contest in 2011, which drew over 470 entries. This time, we are not interested in the vessel that holds your daily intake of caffeine, but rather in the object that fuels your creativity and inspiration.
Have a look around, choose the object that sparks your most creative thoughts and solutions, take a picture from an interesting perspective, and share it with us!
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I recently travelled 2517 miles to try to solve 50 problems in 50 days using design — a journey that would challenge me to fundamentally rethink my understanding of the user-experience design process.
I set myself a challenge. I wanted to test the limits of design’s ability to solve problems — big and small. To do this, I left the comfort of my computer chair and set out into the unknown. Each day, I had 24 hours to observe a problem, attempt to solve it and then communicate the solution.
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As a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone as if it was yesterday. Among other things, it introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer.
Today, kids grow up with touchscreen experiences like it’s the most natural thing. Parents are amazed by how fast their children understand how a tablet or smartphone works. This shows that touch and gesture interactions have a lot of potential to make mobile experiences easier and more fun to use.
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