Category: Web Design
(This is a sponsored article.) With the big picture established and your user interface considered, it’s time to start building some prototypes. My sixth article in this series of ten articles dives into the prototyping process. As I’ve stressed before in the earlier articles in this series, the best design follows an iterative process: You…
Everybody’s an artist. That was the idea behind the Smashing Creativity Challenge which we announced at the beginning of the month. We asked the community to get their creative ideas flowing, and design a desktop wallpaper for March 2018. The only requirement: The wallpaper had to somehow relate to the theme “Exploring New Worlds”. How?…
When we share our lessons learned, we can’t predict who is going to read them, but it can make all the difference in the world. I still vividly remember that day when I received an email from a school teacher in Johannesburg, South Africa, five or six years ago. Back then, they didn’t have any…
Europe’s imminent privacy overhaul means that we all have to become more diligent about what data we collect, how we collect it, and what we do with it. In our turbulent times, these privacy obligations are about ethics as well as law. Web developers have a major role to play here. After all, healthy data…
(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) Every city has its hidden spots: the best place to see the sunset, a cozy coffee shop that makes excellent espresso, or that impressive building you won’t find in any guidebook. As a visitor, you might stumble across little gems like these by chance, but, well, no one…
Speed is among the top priorities for any website nowadays. One way to make a website load faster is by code-splitting: splitting an application into chunks that can be loaded on demand — loading only the required JavaScript that is needed and nothing else. Websites based on JavaScript frameworks can immediately implement code-splitting through Webpack,…
A common Grid Layout gotcha is when a newcomer to the layout method wonders how to style a grid cell which doesn’t contain any content. In the current Level 1 specification, this isn’t possible since there is no way to target an empty Grid Cell or Grid Area and apply styling. This means that to…
Since its creation in 2011, D3.js has become the de facto standard for building complex data visualizations on the web. React is also quickly maturing as the library of choice for creating component-based user interfaces. Both React and D3 are two excellent tools designed with goals that sometimes collide. Both take control of user interface…
(This is a sponsored article.) With the big picture established — mapping user journeys and defining your design’s look and feel — my fifth article in this series of ten articles dives into the details of designing user interface components. UX, IA, UI: All of these abbreviations can be confusing. In reality, as designers, we’ll…
Here’s a little challenge for you. How would you design a responsive interface for a custom car configurator? The customer should be able to adjust colors, wheels, exterior details, interior details and perhaps accessories — on small and large screens. Doesn’t sound that difficult, does it? We have all seen such interfaces before. Essentially, they…