Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

November can feel rather gray in many parts of the world, so what better way to brighten the month than with some colorful inspiration?

So what icon is the most reliable to show expansion and collapsing for accordions?

In design, we love spending hours obsessing over consistency, grids, and alignment.

The way I see most organizations roll out AI feels more like a farce than a strategy.

Naming is hard.

Misty mornings, leaves shining in bright red, yellow, and orange hues, and spooky creatures making an appearance — October has a very special charm.

To be completely honest with you, I missed the news when CSS Container Queries first shipped.

Sooner or later, a CFO looks at your wireframes and asks what any of it actually does for the bottom line.

Ever since the commercialisation of the Graphical User Interface pioneered by systems like the Xerox Star and popularised by the original Apple Macintosh, software has relied heavily on point-and-click interactions.

For more than 15 years already, our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity for creatives of all backgrounds to put their skills to the test.

In organisations today, data has never been more available.

This article is a sponsored by Fimo Every website is at its best the day it ships.

We know that everything on the web is a box by default, but you’ll find many animated <div>s pretending to be circles.

There’s been a lot of confusion and panic this week about “huge fines”, “drastic measures” and “sweeping new AI rules” in the EU.

This article is a sponsored by Isadora Agency When front-end developers and UX engineers are tasked with building a web interface that feels tactile, bouncy, or destructive, the industry instinct is almost always the same: reach for a physics engine.

Most of us install a dependency once and never look at it again.

Everybody loves a beautiful wallpaper to freshen up their desktops and home screens, right?

Designers have spent years saying they would do better work if the organisation got out of the way.

This article is a sponsored by MacPaw The phrase “artificial intelligence” has many excited, especially those in tech.

React Server Components don’t send HTML to your browser.

We’ve all heard of the sacred rule in modern web development, the rule never to be broken.

Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives.

When a branding project fails, it usually happens long before the logo stage: in the strategy phase, when words like “modern,” “trustworthy,” “premium,” “friendly,” and “disruptive” are left undefined.

Mental health applications keep facing a continuing, measurable crisis: many people stop using them quickly.

This article is a sponsored by Kirki For years, WordPress users have relied on traditional page builders to create websites without writing code.

We often hear about shiny new tools that change everything (yet again).

The design community has entered a period of conversational tunnel vision.

This article is a sponsored by Level Access We know that right now, a senior engineer is shipping a checkout flow they “built” in a single afternoon.

The scent of rain after a hot day, watching the moon rise on a summer night’s sky, or going for a swim in a nearby lake — July is full of small, distinctive moments that can quietly spark new inspiration.

In 2024, an Air Canada customer asked a chatbot about bereavement fares.

For decades, science fiction has cushioned us with the idea that the “android revolution” was a distant fantasy.

In the summer of 2024, I became co-chair of a working group of expert researchers who came together to determine how best to perform accessibility testing with people with cognitive disabilities.

AI-generated prototypes often don't deliver consistently decent results because of tiny inconsistencies scattered all across a design system.

Everyone has a creative spark in them.

The HTTP Archive Web Almanac has been tracking color contrast failures for years.

This article is a sponsored by ProtoPie There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re “doing it right.”

Many companies think they know fairly well what their users want and need, and how they make their decisions.

You know that thing where you have a grid of cards, and you want them to fade in one after another?

In the high-stakes economy of today, the cost of a friction-heavy interface is no longer just “lost clicks”, but potentially millions in wasted engineering spend and lost business value.

In the first part of this series, we talked about the Decision Node Audit.

Last October, I was sitting in a hotel room in Lisbon, the night before I was supposed to demo a project management tool my team had spent four months building.

This article is a sponsored by MacPaw Your grandmother’s vacuum was a trusty but ugly workhorse hidden in a dark closet.

More interfaces now render while the response is still being generated.

May has a way of sneaking in with longer days, softer light, and that first real hint of summer in the air.

Through many discussions with industry colleagues, we’ve started hearing a phrase more often when swapping stories about AI adoption: “Now I don’t have to bug [someone].”

In early 2026, I noticed that the UX designer’s toolkit seemed to shift overnight.

For web professionals, session management is a balancing act between user experience, cybersecurity, and resource usage.

Imagine that you need to improve the UX of a legacy system.