Under Autumn’s Spell (October 2026 Wallpapers Edition)
Misty mornings, leaves shining in bright red, yellow, and orange hues, and spooky creatures making an appearance — October has a very special charm. So, how about some new…
News & blogs · Developers
Smashing Magazine
The latest from Smashing Magazine, part of our Developers coverage. Updated automatically as new posts are published.
Stop Treating CSS Container Queries Like Traditional Media Queries
To be completely honest with you, I missed the news when CSS Container Queries first shipped. And when I finally heard about it, my very first thought was, “Why exactly do I need…
Building A UX ROI Case That Survives The Boardroom
Sooner or later, a CFO looks at your wireframes and asks what any of it actually does for the bottom line. Storyboards don’t answer that question, and the era when a 5-minute…
The Death Of The Button: Why The Best Interface Is No Interface
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…
The Many Faces Of September (2026 Wallpapers Edition)
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. You don’t have to…
Rethinking Data Visualisation: A UX Approach To Dashboards That Actually Drives Decisions
In organisations today, data has never been more available. Dashboards and performance decks exist for almost every function — sales, product, marketing, operations — and the…
Why Your Website Should Never Stop Changing
This article is a sponsored by Fimo Every website is at its best the day it ships. The final branch merges, the site goes live exactly as designed, and it is briefly perfect. It…
Timing Charts: A Blueprint For SMIL Animations
We know that everything on the web is a box by default, but you’ll find many animated <div>s pretending to be circles. But if you’ve ever met a real <circle>, you’ll know that…
New EU Guidelines For AI Labelling
There’s been a lot of confusion and panic this week about “huge fines”, “drastic measures” and “sweeping new AI rules” in the EU. In reality, it’s a lot more narrow — and a lot…
Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie
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…
How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript
Most of us install a dependency once and never look at it again. It does its job, the tests pass, and we move on. But the web platform keeps moving too, and a surprising number…
Small Joys And Big Adventures (August 2026 Wallpapers Edition)
Everybody loves a beautiful wallpaper to freshen up their desktops and home screens, right? To provide you with inspiring designs on a regular basis, we started our monthly…
The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI
Designers have spent years saying they would do better work if the organisation got out of the way. Not always in those exact words, obviously. It usually comes out as something…
Thinking Outside The Box: Digital Design In The AI Era
This article is a sponsored by MacPaw The phrase “artificial intelligence” has many excited, especially those in tech. But for those of us in creative fields like digital art and…
Weaponizing And Defending The React Flight Protocol: Deserialization Sinks In RSCs
React Server Components don’t send HTML to your browser. They don’t send JSON either. When a server component renders, what actually travels over the wire is a custom streaming…
When It Makes Sense To “Block” The Main Thread
We’ve all heard of the sacred rule in modern web development, the rule never to be broken. The rule of “Never block the main thread.” You almost can’t miss it as a web developer…
No, People Don’t Want More AI In Their Life
Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives. That people are craving new AI features, new AI products, new AI workflows — that would all magically…
From Kickoff To First Concept: How To Turn Brand Strategy Into Visual Direction
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…
Designing For Distressed Users: Why Mental Health Apps Shouldn’t Follow Every UI Fashion
Mental health applications keep facing a continuing, measurable crisis: many people stop using them quickly. The data is stark: almost 95% of users who open the app on day 1…
Meet Kirki: WordPress’s First Visual Builder With An Infinite Canvas
This article is a sponsored by Kirki For years, WordPress users have relied on traditional page builders to create websites without writing code. While these builders made web…
Users Don’t Need More Tools: They Need Seamless Integrations
We often hear about shiny new tools that change everything (yet again). But in practice, most people don’t need more tools to deal with in their daily lives. What we actually…