I have an idea for a new product — can I tell you about it? It will take months to develop, and even though this kind of thing is usually given away for free, I’m going to charge for it. Oh, and the market for it probably won’t be very big… Wait, come back! Where are you going?!
It does sound like a crazy idea, but it’s exactly what a small group of designers and writers have been doing for the past year or so. On a Web littered with SEO-ified headlines (“17 Jaw-Dropping Responsive Design Templates and Funny Cat Pictures”), easy-to-share design gallery slideshows and quick tutorials that help you recreate the latest texture fetish in Photoshop, these people are taking a step back from what we have now come to refer to as the “fast Web.”
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The future is mobile. As more and more people are turning to mobile devices, designers and developers are facing new challenges and opportunities. Web design has to adapt, but before it can do so, we have to do our homework first. We have to understand the new medium, discover the right techniques and tools, and be well-prepared before we start designing for it. The Mobile Book, our brand new printed book, serves exactly this purpose.
This beautiful hardcover book will be released early-mid December 2012, and will be provided as an eBook (ePUB, PDF, Kindle) as well. Starting from today, you can pre-order and save 20%!
Our brand new printed Mobile Book features the most important things that you need to know as a designer, developer or mobile strategist to make your websites optimized for mobile. You'll dive deep into the peculiarities of the mobile industry, explore responsive design strategy, design patterns and optimization techniques, learn about wireframing and prototyping for mobile as well as the guidelines for designing with gestures and touch. The extra to the book will also provide insights into the popular platforms such as iOS and Windows Phone, as well as introduces developing and debugging techniques for advanced HTML5 Web applications.
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Howdy, folks! Welcome to more Smashing Magazine CSS Q&A. It works like this: you send in questions you have about CSS, and at least once a month we’ll pick out the best questions and answer them so that everyone can benefit from the exchange.
Your question could be about a very specific problem you're having, or it could even be a question about a philosophical approach. We’ll take all kinds. If you're interested in exploring more Q&A, there's a bunch more in my author archive.
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While Fireworks can be a useful and powerful tool for any screen designer, several aspects of it make it really shine in an enterprise environment when used by both small and large design teams. What do I mean by “enterprise”? For the purpose of this article, enterprise can be defined as any environment where multiple designers, developers and other stakeholders collaborate on a project.
In this situation, Fireworks excels for a variety of reasons. I’ll share the top five reasons why our user experience (UX) team at Citrix (which consists of about 20 designers, researchers and editors, working on Web, desktop and mobile applications) uses Fireworks. I’ll illustrate my points with a few practical examples, as well as examples from other design firms.
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Misaligned interests create tension in the design process that can lead to bad, and potentially unethical, design decisions, that result in inferior products. In this article I will examine how the desire to build a large audience by giving away your products and services free of charge can cause conflicts of interest, which in turn can lead to dubious compromises in the design process that limit the full potential of your work.
The recently launched Twitter competitor, App.net, which has raised over $800,000 in the first month of fund-raising/pre-sales, has started its life as a simple premise: Twitter doesn’t work because the interests of the company and its users, along with the developers creating apps for its platform, are not aligned.
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When Albert Einstein was a professor at Princeton University in the 1940s, there came the time for the final exam of his physics class. His assistants passed the exam forms to the hundreds of students, and the hall was dead silent. One of the assistants suddenly noticed something was wrong.
She approached Einstein and told him that a mistake had been made with the exam form and that the questions were the same as those in the previous year’s exam. Einstein glanced over the exam form and said that it was OK. He explained that physics had changed so much in the last year that the answers to the questions were now different.
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WordPress security is serious business. Exploits of vulnerabilities in WordPress’ architecture have led to mass compromises of servers through cross-site contamination. WordPress’ extensibility increases its vulnerability; plugins and themes house flawed logic, loopholes, Easter eggs, backdoors and a slew of other issues. Firing up your computer to find that you’re supporting a random cause or selling Viagra can be devastating.
In WordPress’ core, all security issues are quickly addressed; the WordPress team is focused on strictly maintaining the integrity of the application. The same, however, cannot be said for all plugins and themes.
The focus of this post is not to add to the overwhelming number of WordPress security or WordPress hardening posts that you see floating around the Web. Rather, we’ll provide more context about the things you need to protect yourself from. What hacks are WordPress users particularly vulnerable to? How do they get in? What do they do to a WordPress website? In this lengthy article, we'll cover backdoors, drive-by downloads, pharma hack and malicious redirects.
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At some point or another, you will find yourself writing JavaScript code that exceeds the couple of lines from a jQuery plugin. Your code will do a whole lot of things; it will (ideally) be used by many people who will approach your code differently. They have different needs, knowledge and expectations.
This article covers the most important things that you will need to consider before and while writing your own utilities and libraries. We'll focus on how to make your code accessible to other developers. A couple of topics will be touching upon jQuery for demonstration, yet this article is neither about jQuery nor about writing plugins for it.
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Today, we present yet another freebie — a free set of icons related to movies and television, designed by Samuray and released for Smashing Magazine and the design community. The icons are available in six different sizes as transparent PNG files, JPG files as well as Photoshop PSD source files.
You can use this icon set freely for commercial and personal projects. Please link to this release post if you want to spread the word. The icons are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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