Exploring New Worlds In March: The Smashing Creativity Challenge Winners

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? Well, only your imagination was the limit. Today, we are happy to present the result of this creative experiment, and the lucky winner, too, of course.

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Smashing Newsletter #200: The Things We Learned

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have any teaching materials available at their school, and interaction design was often taught on paper with a few outdated books from the 90s.

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How GPDR Will Change The Way You Develop

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 protection practice is as much about the development side — code, data, and security — as it is about the business side of process, information, and strategy.

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A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide (Part 2)

In Part 1, I emphasized on the importance of recognizing the purpose of your website, and why planning for the web is just as important as planning for anything else associated with your business. Today, I’d like to go into more detail of evaluating a plan, choosing web professionals, and determining your site structure. Writing The Plan (Or Proposal) Note: The following section is for designers, but everyone ought to understand this part of the process.

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Adobe XD Contest: Create An App Prototype With Your City's Best-Kept Secrets

(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 knows a city’s secrets as well as the locals, right? Now’s your opportunity to let fellow creatives see your city through your eyes — and to put your design skills to the test at the same time.

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Adding Code-Splitting Capabilities To A WordPress Website Through PoP

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, the popular JavaScript bundler. For WordPress websites, though, it is not so easy. First, Webpack was not intentionally built to work with WordPress, so setting it up will require quite some workaround; secondly, no tools seem to be available that provide native on-demand asset-loading capabilities for WordPress.

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Styling Empty Cells With Generated Content And CSS Grid Layout

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 apply styling, you need to insert an element. In this article, I am going to take a look at how to use CSS Generated Content to achieve styling of empty cells without adding redundant empty elements and show some use cases where this technique makes sense.

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Bringing Together React, D3, And Their Ecosystem

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 elements, and they do so in different ways. How can we make them work together while optimizing for their distinct advantages according to your current project?

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A Comprehensive Guide To UI Design

(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 often be working across these different specialisms: designing the overall user experience (UX), organizing information logically as we consider information architecture (IA), and considering the granular design of the user interface (UI).

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A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide (Part 1)

As a veteran designer, developer and project manager on more sites than I can count, I’ve identified a common problem with many web projects: failure to plan. As the same issues come up repeatedly in my work, I’ve written this guide in order to help our clients, other designers, businesses and organizations plan and realize successful websites. Who This Guide Is For Written in relatively non-technical language, this guide provides a broad overview of the process of developing a website, from the initial needs assessment through site launch, maintenance and follow up.

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Designing A Perfect Responsive Configurator

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? In fact, we have all seen such interfaces before. Essentially, they are just a combination of some navigation, iconography, buttons, accordions and a real-time 3D preview.

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Getting Started In Public Speaking: Global Diversity CFP Day

A CFP, or Call For Proposals (sometimes also known as a Call For Papers), is a request for speakers to send their proposed talk ideas to a conference. The conference will review the proposals and decide who to ask to speak. Popular conferences can receive hundreds of proposals for a handful of speaking slots, therefore creating a great proposal is an important skill to learn as a speaker. To help encourage people to write and submit to CFPs, Global Diversity CFP Day aims to help underrepresented people submit proposals to speak at conferences.

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Monthly Web Development Update 2/2018: The Grown-Up Web, Branding Details, And Browser Fast Forward

Every profession is a wide field where many people find their very own, custom niches. So are design and web development today. I started building my first website with framesets and HTML4.0, images and a super limited set of CSS, and — oh fancy — gifs and inline JavaScript (remember the onclick=“” attribute?) about one and a half decades ago. It took me four days to learn the initial, necessary skills for that.

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Designing For User Interfaces: Icons As Visual Elements For Screen Design

(This is a sponsored article.) Icons are everywhere. They have been around for a long time, and it’s difficult to imagine a world without icons or symbols today. Only designers will know how much effort and time is needed to not only make them helpful but also simple and expressive. What makes icons particularly special is perhaps the fact that their meaning can be understood without having to add any text or further details.

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Learning Framer By Creating A Mobile App Prototype

The time of static user interfaces is long gone. Designing interactive prototypes is the best approach to expressing your ideas and explaining them to clients and stakeholders. Or, as Jerry Cao of UXPin puts it: “Nothing brings you closer to the functionality of the final product than prototyping. It is the prototype that brings to life the experience behind user experience.” Prototyping is an important part of the modern UX design process.

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How To Streamline WordPress Multisite Migrations With MU-Migration

Migrating a standalone WordPress site to a site network (or “multisite”) environment is a tedious and tricky endeavor, the opposite is also true. The WordPress Importer works reasonably well for smaller, simpler sites, but leaves room for improvement. It exports content, but not site configuration data such as Widget and Customizer configurations, plugins, and site settings. The Importer also struggles to handle a large amount of content. In this article, you’ll learn how to streamline this type of migration by using MU-Migration, a WP-CLI plugin.

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Replacing jQuery With Vue.js: No Build Step Necessary

It’s been impossible to ignore all of the hype surrounding JavaScript frameworks lately, but they might not be the right fit for your projects. Perhaps you don’t want to set up an entire build system for some small abstractions you could feasibly do without. Perhaps moving a project over to a build system and thus, different deployment method would mean a lot of extra time and effort that you might not be able to bill to a client.

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A Comprehensive Guide To Mobile App Design

(This is a sponsored article.) More than ever, people are engaging with their phones in crucial moments. The average US user spends 5 hours per day on mobile. The vast majority of that time is spent in apps and on websites. The difference between a good app and a bad app is usually the quality of its user experience (UX). A good UX is what separates successful apps from unsuccessful ones.

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SSE Instead Of WebSockets For Unidirectional Data Flow Over HTTP/2

When building a web application, one must consider what kind of delivery mechanism they are going to use. Let’s say we have a cross-platform application that works with real-time data; a stock market application providing ability to buy or sell stock in real time. This application is composed of widgets that bring different value to the different users. When it comes to data delivery from the server to the client, we are limited to two general approaches: client pull or server push.

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Free Adobe XD Icon Sets Made By Legendary Designers

(This is a sponsored article.) Our friends at Adobe unveiled a very special goodie at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin today. A goodie which is too good to miss: They asked three renowned designers to create exclusive free icon sets to use in Adobe XD. And, well, we are very happy to feature them here on Smashing Magazine, too. The icon kits were created by design legend Lance Wyman, award-winning design studio Anton & Irene, and the Swiss design group Büro Destruct.

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Native And PWA: Choices, Not Challengers!

It’s hard to tell exactly where the rift between “native” and “web” really started. I feel like it’s one of those things that had been churning just below the surface since the early days of Flash, only to erupt more recently with the rise of mobile platforms. Regardless, developers have squared off across this “great chasm,” lobbing insults at one another in an attempt to bolster their own side.

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A Comprehensive Guide To User Experience Design

(This is a sponsored article.) Having undertaken initial user research and analyzed your research findings, the next phase of the design process is to apply what you’ve learned by developing a series of designs to test your assumptions. In the fourth article in my series for Adobe XD, I’ll be focusing on the initial phase of the design process. Within this overall series of ten articles, this is the first of three that tie together the design process.

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77 Hand-Drawn Space Icons That’ll Take You Into Unexplored Territories (Freebie)

When you were small, haven’t you ever dreamt of becoming the commander of a space mission? Of exploring outer space and seing the Earth from above? Well, you might not have made it into an actual space shuttle, but maybe you still carry this fascination for everything extraterrestrial inside of you. Great! Because today we want to take you on your very personal trip to space. Buckle up as you’ll become the captain of the command center — and maybe you’ll even make the acquaintance of an actual alien, too.

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Submitting Forms Without Reloading The Page: AJAX Implementation In WordPress

If you have ever wanted to send a form without reloading the page, provide a look-ahead search function that prompts the user with suggestions as they type, or auto-save documents, then what you need is AJAX (also known as XHR). A behind-the-scenes request is sent to the server, and returning data to your form. Whenever you see a loader animation after you have made some action on the page, it’s probably an AJAX request being submitted to the server.

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Live Stream From Awwwards Berlin 2018: Showcasing Trends In UX Design

Designing the best experience is a challenge, and every designer and developer has their own way of tackling it. But, well, no matter how different our approaches are, one thing is for sure: We can learn a lot from each other. To give you your dose of UX inspiration, we are happy to announce that our dear friends at Adobe, are streaming live from the Awwwards Conference which will take place in Berlin on February 8th and 9th.

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Taking A Look At The State Of Progressive Images And User Perception

“Progressive Images” is a hot topic these days. We often come across articles explaining techniques on how to avoid showing an empty space where an image will load. Medium and Facebook are examples of websites and mobile apps that apply this pattern. I recently wrote about different ways to use SVG as placeholders, and this year’s PerfPlanet’s Performance Calendar included two posts that further describe SQIP, a technique based on blurred SVGs: Progressive Image Loading using Intersection Observer and SQIP and SQIP — Vague Vectors for Performant Previews.

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Mobile App With Facial Recognition Feature: How To Make It Real

Imagine an application that can, in real time, analyze a user’s emotional response while they’re interacting with an app or website. Or imagine a home device that recognizes you and tunes in to your favorite TV channel. Yes, today’s article is all about facial recognition technology. We’re going to share our first experience of dealing with this technology and the findings we’ve made. Why Is Facial Recognition On The Rise?

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Exploring New Worlds: A Smashing Creativity Challenge

Time flies! Did you know that it has been more than nine years already since we first embarked on our wallpapers adventure? Nine years is a long time, and sometimes we all should break out of our comfort zones and try something new, right? We’d love to invite you to a little creativity challenge: Get out your pens, paint brushes, camera, or fire up your favorite illustration tool, and design a desktop wallpaper for March 2018.

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Using Media Queries For Responsive Design In 2018

Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine entitled “How To Use CSS3 Media Queries To Create A Mobile Version of Your Website.” Almost eight years on, that article still receives a lot of traffic. I thought it would be a nice idea to revisit that subject, now that we have layout methods such as Flexbox and Grid Layout. This article will take a look at the use of Media Queries for responsive design today, and also have a look at what is coming in the future.

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What Is The Best Advice You Have Ever Received? Our Community Speaks.

The beginning of a new year seems like a perfect time to think about what we web professionals do, why we do it, how we could do it better and even how we could have more fun doing it. Like everyone, we learn lessons as we make our way through life and work. If we’re lucky, we pick up some good advice along the way, so we thought it might be useful to find out what kind of advice you all have found to be particularly valuable.

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How To Make A Dynamic Website Become Static Through A Content CDN

Smashing Magazine gave us a little surprise recently: Its website has been completely overhauled, switching away from WordPress to Netlify. One of the several reasons for the move is cost: Netlify allows for a static version of a website, which can be hosted directly on a content delivery network (CDN), reducing the number of web servers that are needed. In addition, because CDNs are located near users, accessing the website becomes faster.

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Content Marketing And WordPress: Tips, Plugins, And How To Make An Impact

Content marketing is the practice of creating a piece of content (generally digital) that is both useful and valuable to certain members of your target market(s). This piece of content is generally free, though it may be hidden behind a simple email/lead-capture form, and it usually is meant to be found through search or through free/low-budget distribution methods (think social media, low-cost PPC, a small press release). Some might call this permission marketing, the idea being that your target customers have given you permission to market to them by choosing to access your content.

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Debugging JavaScript With A Real Debugger You Did Not Know You Already Have

console.log can tell you a lot about your app, but it can’t truly debug your code. For that, you need a full-fledged JavaScript debugger. The new Firefox JavaScript debugger can help you write fast, bug-free code. Here’s how it works. In this example, we’ll crack open a very simple to-do app with Debugger. Here’s the app, based on basic open-source JavaScript frameworks. Open it up in the latest version of Firefox Developer Edition and then launch debugger.

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