Sometimes things evolve faster than you think. Something that started as a simple WordPress blog back in September 2006, has evolved into a little Smashing universe — with books, eBooks, conferences, workshops, consultancy, job board and, most recently, 56 fancy cats (upcoming, also known as Smashing Membership). We have a wonderful team making it all…
As designers, we like to think we are solution-based. But whereas we wouldn’t hesitate to call out a museum made inaccessible by a lack of wheelchair ramps, many of us still remain somewhat oblivious to flaws in our user interfaces. Poor visual design, in particular, can be a barrier to a good user experience. Whereas…
With the appearance of voice user interfaces, AI and chatbots, what is the future of graphical user interfaces (GUIs)? Don’t worry: Despite some dark predictions, GUIs will stay around for many years to come. Let me share my personal, humble predictions and introduce multi-modal interfaces as a more human way of communication between user and…
Five years ago, when, for the first time ever, I was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, I had quite a mixture of feelings. Obviously, I was incredibly proud and happy: I had never had a chance to do this before for a diverse audience of people with different…
When first learning how to use Grid Layout, you might begin by addressing positions on the grid by their line number. This requires that you keep track of where various lines are on the grid, and also be aware of the fact the line numbers reverse if your site is displayed for a right-to-left language….
Editor’s Note: Welcome to this month’s web development update. Anselm has summarized the most important happenings in the web community that have taken place over the past few weeks in one handy list for you. Enjoy! As web developers, we’re working in a very diverse environment: We have countless options to specialize in, but it’s…
You know that user feedback is crucial — after all, your users will decide whether your app succeeds or not — but how do you know whether users are being fair and objective in their feedback? We can tell you: They won’t be. All of your users will be giving you biased feedback. They can’t…
With so many JavaScript frameworks around, single-page application (SPA) websites seem to be all the rage nowadays. However, an SPA architecture has the drawback of having a slower first-page load than a server-based application, because all of the JavaScript templates used to render the HTML view must be downloaded before the required view can be…
Editor’s Note: We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building a design system or a pattern library, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and…
CSS Grid is becoming the new layout standard for the web, and we are all still experimenting with what we can achieve with it. Some folks assume that CSS Grid is just a replacement for table layouts or Flexbox — but that’s simply not true. Some also think that they can use CSS Grid to…
