Readability programs may seem like a godsend, but the worst thing writers can do is write to please them above all others. Finding your voice is hard enough without also trying to sound like everyone else.
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If you’ve been looking for a list of email newsletters dedicated to web designers and developers, we’ve got one that is bound to help you keep up with the industry — the most useful news and resources sent directly to your email inbox.
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In this article, I’ll focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. I’ll start with global things like the user journey (how to define the “skeleton” of the website) and work down to the individual page (what should be considered during web page design). We’ll also cover other essential aspects of design, such as mobile considerations and testing.
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With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.
To make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, we collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!
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Does writing microcopy need to be considered an essential part of the design process? Most definitely, yes. Words, for the most part, still form the backbone of communication on the web, even with the emergence of new technologies such as Voice User Interfaces (VUI).
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It’s the small details that make a project shine. Solid typography, well-crafted with attention and care is one of them. A harmonious visual rhythm, typographic subtleties like soft caps, margin outdents or the correct use of hyphens and dashes — there are a lot of things that add up to it.
In practice, however, publishing on the web is supposed to be fast, and the little details are often overlooked, which is a pity, because they are not only pleasing to the eye but also improve the reading experience.
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Nothing is perfect on the web. We can’t make sure that our websites always work as intended, but we can try our best to design resilient and flexible websites that aren’t that easy to break — both in terms of interface design and security. Yet neither resilience nor flexibility are usually reflected in our deliverables and mock-ups.
In practice, mock-ups usually represent a perfect experience in a perfect context with perfect data which doesn’t really exist. A good example for it are “optimal” usernames which are perfectly short, fit on a single line on mobile and wrap nicely, or perfect photography that allows for perfectly legible text overlays. It’s not realistic. We need to work with dynamic content in our prototypes, with both average and extremes being represented.
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Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter “Quick Tips”-kind-of articles —_shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team. What do you think? Let us know in the comments! —Ed.\n\nThe Internet is the foundation of our craft. But what do we actually know about its underlying technology? How do DNS, networks and HTTPS work? What happens in the browser when we type a URL in the address bar?
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Podcasts can be a great way to build a closer relationship with your customers and fans. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to regularly deliver new content, but the reward is more than worth the effort.
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It’s always great to have a little toolbox with just the right tools waiting for you when you need them. What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? What if you had just a good starter kit with everything you need to dive into the creative process without being distracted by routine tasks?
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