During the early days of the World Wide Web, things were rather static and boring. Webpages were mostly based on graphic design and layouts from the print world until animations were introduced. Animation can engage and hold people’s attention longer than a static web page and communicates an idea or concept more clearly and effectively….
This week at Smashing, we celebrated 14 years of bringing you the best web design and development content — and what an interesting year it has been! Last year, I published the 13th birthday post from our team meeting in Freiburg. Back then, we were about to run SmashingConf Freiburg and our meeting was full…
Lighthouse is Google’s suite of website quality analysis tools. It allows you to assess your site’s performance, accessibility, SEO, and more. It is also highly configurable, making it flexible enough to be useful for all sites, from the simplest to the highly complex. This flexibility includes several different ways of running the tests, allowing you…
Next.js is a React framework that enables you to build static and dynamic apps quickly. It is production-ready and supports server-side rendering and static site generation out of the box, making Next.js apps fast and SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, I will first explain what exactly Next.js is and why you’d use it instead of Create…
CSS has recently added features that allow us to recognize certain user preferences and qualities of the user’s current environment. One of those new features, specifically the prefers-reduced-motion media feature, can be especially useful for designing more inclusive motion on the web. A few years back, I wrote an article about designing safer web animation…
Today we’re talking about SVG Animation. How can vector images, JavaScript and CSS all work together to provide engaging motion graphics? I spoke to SVG expert Cassie Evans to find out. Show Notes The SVG Animation Masterclass with Smashing Conference Cassie on Twitter Cassie’s personal website Weekly Update “How To Do More With Vue Router”by…
Last month we released Smart Interface Design Checklists PDF, a deck of 100 cards with questions to ask when designing and building pretty much any interface component. Each checklist — from intricate data tables and web forms to troublesome hamburgers and carousels — has been curated and refined for years. All checklists are based upon…
One of my favorite features in Postman is the ability to write automated tests for my APIs. So if you are like me and you use Postman and you are tired of manually testing your APIs, this article will show how to harness the test automation feature provided by Postman. In case you don’t know…
According to Clearleft, a component library is: “A collection of components, organised in a meaningful manner, and often (but not necessarily) providing some way to browse and preview those components and their associated assets.” — “On Building Component Libraries,” Clearleft We’ll learn how to build a component library by making one that comprises four components:…
There’s nothing novel about using icons within mobile apps. From the home screen icon to the navigation menu, they’re pretty much a standard part of the apps that designers build. They come with big benefits too: Minimized distractions, More attractive UIs, Empowerment of users to easily engage with the app, Elimination of language barriers, Improvement…
