To celebrate the relaunch of this little website, we’ve prepared something special yet again — a Smashing Emoji Mystery Riddle. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden key. The key is always exactly one emoji. Your job is to find these emoji as fast as possible. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the discovered emoji in one single tweet at @smashingmag.
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Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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Middle Eastern countries require design that is suitable to their language standards, making a serious adaptation process very important. Given that most languages spoken in the Middle East are written and read from right to left, developers often face a range of problems when creating products in those languages. In this article, Robert Dodis & Yvette Mosiichuk will show you some tips which if you follow closely, you should be able to navigate the challenging waters of RTL development and deliver a functional, user-friendly result.
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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. At the 2016 ATypI conference, the world’s biggest type design conference, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Adobe announced that they have been working on a new iteration of the OpenType standard, called variable fonts. Because it gives a lot more control to the user to modify the typeface depending on the context and device, this new version opens new opportunities for web typography and will close the gap in quality between web and print. In this article, François Poizat will show you the ins and outs of these new tools and how to take control of our typography.
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While many of us are quite familiar with publications and events surrounding us, we often lack the global perspective on what’s happening in the web industry across the world. What about front-end events in Kuala Lumpur? What about the acceptance of UX-driven processes in Hong Kong? That’s exactly what we want to find out! Today, Vitaly Friedman is happy to announce that we have teamed up with our friends at Mozilla for the Developer Roadshow Asia, so we can connect and learn from designers and developers in southeastern Asia. Together, we’re planning on organizing a series of informal, free meetup-style events for people who build for the web. Do join us, won’t you?
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When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table.
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Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out.
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Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites.
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Humor is an important aspect of life. It has many positive benefits, like reducing stress, increasing psychological well being and increasing tolerance for pain. Humor is integral and inherent to human relationships. You can use humor in your design to create a positive user experience. We want to develop positive relationships with our users — humor can help make that happen. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you that you can incorporate humor in your design, maintain your brand identity and not look like you are trying too hard in the process.
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Previously, Bruce Lawson’s tried to make some supply-side improvements to web standards so that websites can be made to better serve the whole world, not just the wealthy West. But there are other challenges, such as ways to get over creaky infrastructure in developing markets, to surmount, and Bruce will also look at some of the reasons why some of the offline billions remain offline, and what can be done to address this.
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