April 13, 2020 — In this eighth issue of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will explain how learning about American graphic designer and typographer Herb Lubalin has transformed his approach to typography on the web. How can we combine elements to develop powerful headers and calls to action? How do we use pre-formatted HTML text, and the text element in SVG for precise control over type? How can we optimise SVGs and make SVG text accessible? In this article, we’ll explore just that. Read more…

April 10, 2020 — In this tutorial, you are going to learn and understand what React hooks are, the basic React Hooks that are available and also examples of how to write them for your React applications. In the process, you will also get to know about some additional hooks that were shipped with React 16.8 and also how to write your own custom React Hooks. Read more…

April 9, 2020 — All search engines share the same purpose: to organize the web’s content and deliver the most relevant, useful results possible to search queries. How they achieve this has changed enormously since the days of Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors, and those are just the ones we know about. Retrofitting search engine optimization only gets you so far. As metadata gets smarter, it’s more important than ever to build it into the design process from the start. Read more…

April 8, 2020 — In this article, Chidi Orji will create a set of API endpoints using Express from scratch in ES6 syntax, and cover some development best practices. Find out how all the pieces work together as you create a small project using Continuous Integration and Test-Driven Development before deploying to Heroku. Read more…

April 7, 2020 — In this episode of the Smashing Podcast we’re talking about online privacy. What should web developers be doing to make sure the privacy of our users is maintained? Drew McLellan talks to an expert on the subject, Laura Kalbag, to find out. Read more…

April 6, 2020 — Writing is a crucial skill every software developer should cultivate. And writing on your own technical blog can have immense benefits to your career as a software developer and help you cultivate your skills and expertise. Creating and hosting a technical blog provides an opportunity to do just that. In this article, Zara Cooper will take a look at how to deploy a blog for free and with minimal effort using Hugo and Firebase. Read more…

April 3, 2020 — Early this month, The Ethical Design Handbook joined the Smashing Library of essential books for designers and developers. Changes around the world have meant changes in the book release, but readers love it so far! Ethical Design principles are timeless and we are seeing the results of that during an unprecedented time of change. Read more…

April 2, 2020 — Creating front-end code in Django with templating and server-side rendering combines the fine-grained control of handwritten HTML with the clean code and powerful features of generated pages. We explore breaking down a complex webpage into multiple templates, composing those components, and applying tags and filters to refactor a plain HTML page. Read more…

April 1, 2020 — In this article, Blessing Krofegha introduces the concept of the headless CMS, a backend-only content management system that allows developers to create, store, manage and publish the content over an API. It gives developers the power to quickly build excellent user experiences, free from the worry of its impact on the back-end business logic. Read more…

March 31, 2020 — By now, you’re probably used to seeing design trends come and go. But have you ever given any thought to what passing trends do to a website when left there for too long? As a web designer, you have a few choices. You can ignore popular design trends altogether; you can adopt them, but pull them out of rotation the second they go stale, or you can put your own unique spin on them. This guide will help you figure out which approach makes the most sense for your site. Read more…