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dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
As web design focuses more and more on good user experience, designers need to create the most usable and attractive websites possible. Carefully applied minimalist principles can help designers make attractive and effective websites with fewer elements, simplifying and improving users’ interactions.
In this article, I will discuss some examples of minimalism in web design, things to consider when designing minimalist interfaces, and explain why sometimes "less is more". If you’d like to get more creative with your own designs, you can download and test Adobe XD, and get started right away.
Most days, your goal as a developer is to design, develop and program awesome software. However, part of the job is also finding new clients, and you don’t want to be caught off guard by unexpected legal documents that come up while you’re establishing new clients.
The most common legal document you will be asked to sign when working on a website or app is a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If you’re not sure whether to sign an NDA as a developer, this article will guide you to make an educated decision.
Bright, colorful leaves, rainy days, Halloween. That’s October — at least if you’re living in the Northern hemisphere. To provide you with some fresh inspiration even when the weather is gray, artists and designers from across the globe once again challenged their creative skills to design beautiful, one-of-a-kind (and this time around also spooky) wallpapers for you to indulge in.
This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for nine years already, and we are very thankful to everyone who has and still is contributing to it each month anew. The wallpapers in this collection all come in versions with and without a calendar for October 2017 and can be downloaded for free. Happy October!
In March this year, CSS Grid shipped into production versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari within weeks of each other. It has been great to see how excited people are about finally being able to use it to solve real problems.
CSS Grid is such a different way of approaching layout that there are a number of common questions I am asked as people start to use the specification. This article aims to answer some of those, and will be one in a series of articles on Smashing Magazine about layouts.
What do UX designers do on a daily basis? A lot of things! UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables (tangible records of work that has occurred) for that purpose.
I've created a list that contains the most common deliverables produced by UX designers as they craft great experiences for users. For better readability, I’ve combined the deliverables according to UX activities.
Summer might be over, but the memories of the places you’ve visited and the people you’ve met remain. No matter if you explored an exotic country, packed your car for a road trip or took out the hiking boots to discover the nature around you — traveling is a great opportunity to discover new places, gain a fresh view on things, and make lasting experiences.
To keep the essence of summer alive a bit longer, the creative minds at AgenteStudio dedicated an entire icon set to traveling. It includes 60 icons with everything from transportation and equipment to nature, activities and other motifs that are bound to awaken your wanderlust. The icons come in two versions — one monochromatic line art and one with color accents. EPS, AI, SVG and PNG formats are available, so it’s easy to customize the icons to your liking.
Two years ago, I decided to start a series of short WebGL experiments on Codepen. Earlier this year, I finally found the time to compile them all together on a single website named "Moments of Happiness". Since its incarnation, I’ve found ways to explore and learn different animation and interaction techniques, which I’ve implemented in these interactive toys.
As you'll see, the gameplay is very different in each one, but all of the experiments share one principle: The behavior of each character responds programmatically to user input. No precalculated animation — every movement is defined at runtime. Breathing life into these characters with only a few lines of code was the main challenge.
In today's digital landscape, developers constantly need to be adding new tools to remain competitive and at the top of their craft.
If you regularly create new web or mobile applications, then Amazon Cognito is a powerful tool that can cut 90% of the time it usually takes to set up a custom user-management solution. If that is intriguing to you, then let's continue the journey to learn more about what Amazon Cognito has to offer.
Color is one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolkit. Color can draw attention, set a mood, and influence the user’s emotion, perception and actions. When it comes to the web and mobile app design, this is definitely a time of vibrant colors. Designers use vibrant colors to focus people’s attention on important elements and to make their designs memorable.
In this article, I’ll summarize a few popular techniques of using vibrant colors in web and mobile design. Also, if you’d like to get started designing and prototyping your own web and mobile experiences, download Adobe XD.
Some things are either on or off and, when those things aren’t on (or off), they are invariably off (or on). The concept is so rudimentary that I’ve only complicated it by trying to explain it, yet on/off switches (or toggle buttons) are not all alike. Although their purpose is simple, their applications and forms vary greatly.
In this inaugural post, I’ll be exploring what it takes to make toggle buttons inclusive. As with any component, there’s no one way to go about this, especially when such controls are examined under different contexts. However, there’s certainly plenty to forget to do or to otherwise screw up, so let’s try to avoid any of that.
If you've ever tried to implement a bulletproof, good-looking file uploader, you might have encountered an issue: uploading an entire folder or folders of files is usually quite a hassle, as files in each folder have to be selected manually. And then some folders might contain sub-folders as well.
Well, we can use webkitdirectory, a non-standard attribute that allows users to pick a directory via a file input. Currently supported in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Words are the primary component of content for the web. However, until a short while ago, all we had at our disposal were but a few system fonts. Adding to that, those system typefaces weren’t necessarily coherent from operating system to operating system (OS).
Fortunately, Windows, macOS and Linux made up font-wise, and since then, all modern fonts have been compatible across those OS’. There’s no question, the future of web typography looks promising.