During the two days of the Smashing Conference, we will provide you with insights, photos and highlights on Smashing Magazine — live from the conference venue. Our team will be posting updates from the early morning to the late evening on both dates to bring you as close to the conference as possible. You can also track the tweets from the conference by following the hashtag #smashingconf.
Bookmark this page to follow the auto-updates in real-time. Please notice that no live stream is available, but all videos will be made available for free after the event. You might want to check the schedule of the conference as well.
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My relationship with the Internet oscillates between waves of euphoria and waves of angst. Some things make me extraordinarily happy: like a client who loves usability testing so much when they first experience it that they can’t sleep for days; or connecting with someone whose writing I’ve admired for many years.
But other things make me want to close my computer forever and go live on a farm somewhere: like people who take entire articles and present them as their own work, with tiny source links at the bottom of the page; or endless arguments and name-calling that ignore even the most basic human dignity.
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As we’ve seen, audio is used as a feedback mechanism when users interact with many of their everyday devices, such as mobile phones, cars, toys and robots. There are many subtleties to designing with audio in order to create useful, non-intrusive experiences. Here, we’ll explore some guidelines and principles to consider when designing with audio.
While I won’t cover this here, audio is a powerful tool for designing experiences for accessibility, and many of the guidelines discussed here apply. Both Android phones and iPhones already have accessibility options that enable richer experiences with gestural and audio input and audio output.
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A well-functioning pattern library is a beautiful thing. It is a powerful resource that you and your entire team can use to efficiently create consistent user experiences for your website or service. It cuts out repetitive design work, allowing you to focus your energy on creating new user experiences; and it creates a common UI language for your team, reducing communication issues and keeping everyone on the same page.
But to many designers, creating a pattern library can feel like a daunting academic pursuit, or simply useless overhead documentation. To make matters worse, getting consensus on which technology to use and how to get started is hard. After experimenting with various options, our team has found that using Evernote to house our pattern library of Adobe Fireworks PNG design files has proven to be a winning combination. We’ll outline how you can use Evernote and Fireworks to easily build your own pattern library and reap the benefits mentioned above.
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We all know that WordPress is awesome - but being awesome isn't always enough. Does it perform well under pressure? Can it deal with traffic from millions of visitors every month? There's no question that WordPress can be used for your or my blog, but what about multi-authored blogs with thousands of comments? How do developers make it scale and perform?
I talked to the developers behind some of the biggest WordPress blogs on the planet and asked them to tell me their secrets. Now I get to share them with you.
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Most designers would agree that navigation is one of the most critical components of a website. Despite this, it is not always easy to use or access. Traditionally, users must scroll back to the top of the website to access the navigation menu. I recently wondered whether sticky menus makes websites quicker to navigate, and I conducted a usability study to find the answer.
Let’s look at the results of the study, a few implementation techniques and some related challenges. Sticky, or fixed, navigation is basically a website menu that is locked into place so that it does not disappear when the user scrolls down the page; in other words, it is accessible from anywhere on the website without having to scroll.
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As a designer looking to broaden your skill set, you’ve decided that learning to make native apps for Apple’s iOS platform is an attractive and potentially lucrative prospect. With a frisson of excitement, you start to do some research. The euphoria is short-lived however, as you quickly discover that unless you are an experienced programmer, the task is far from easy.
This post will help you get to know the iOS SDK a little better. It leads you through some choreographed steps of iOS app development, even if you have little or no programming knowledge. It covers some key principles and applies these directly to something useful and relevant: the creation of a simple but functioning portfolio app for the iPhone.
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If you deal with images, sooner or later you will want to automate the repeating process of saving different sizes from one source image. If you own Adobe Photoshop and do not save too many output sizes, Photoshop actions are probably quite enough for your needs. However, keeping a Photoshop action up-to-date is quite painful — change a source folder, and you're screwed.
As you probably noticed in Smashing Magazine's monthly desktop wallpaper series, especially if you work on wallpapers, preparing them for a plethora of desktop resolutions is quite a task. On my own wallpapers website, I generate more than 300 JPEG files for each wallpaper! I want my art to reach as many devices as possible, which means I need to publish my wallpapers in as many sizes as I can support. On the other hand, I do not want to spend the rest of my life resizing my artworks — I’d rather draw new ones!
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As with most designers, being sure that we explore and select the most successful, memorable and stimulating designs is a vital aspect that underpins every project we undertake. For us, the beginning of a new challenge has never been as simple as asking ourselves what might be the best avenue to take and then sitting down at a computer and attempting to fulfill that idea.
After researching the subject matter, we will almost always begin with a sheet of paper and pencil and draw out a variety of design options to help bring together and develop the breadth of ideas that are maturing in our minds. In this article, we will explore the use of drawing and mark-making as an integral part of the creative process.
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