Trends

For the designers and interested clients out there, below are some recent articles on trends in the web design industry.

Getting To The Bottom Of Minimum WCAG-Conformant Interactive Element Size

WCAG provides guidance for making interactive elements more accessible by specifying minimum size requirements. In this article, Eric Bailey discusses the nuances of interactive element sizes and clarifies what it looks like to provide accessible interactive experiences using WCAG-compliant target sizes.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

Integrating Image-To-Text And Text-To-Speech Models (Part 1)

Joas Pambou built an app that integrates vision language models (VLMs) and text-to-speech (TTS) AI technologies to describe images audibly with speech. This audio description tool can be a big help for people with sight challenges to understand what’s in an image. But how this does it even work? Joas explains how these AI systems work and their potential uses, including how he built the app and ways to further improve it.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

Rethinking The Role Of Your UX Teams And Move Beyond Firefighting

Many UX professionals often find themselves working alone, and usually face more projects impacting user experience than they can handle. In this article, Paul Boag explains how UX teams can be transformed into a significant driver of customer-centric innovation within organizations.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

Sweet Nostalgia In August (2024 Wallpapers Edition)

Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of desktop wallpapers might be for you. Designed by the community for the community, they come in versions with and without a calendar for August 2024. Enjoy!

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

How To Build A Multilingual Website With Nuxt.js

Handling translations for multilingual websites is famously difficult and, yet, crucial for many companies and organizations that serve a global audience. Thankfully, modern tooling abstracts away a great deal of the work, allowing for seamless translations that dynamically update the rendered content on a page, as demonstrated in this step-by-step tutorial.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

If I Was Starting My Career Today: Thoughts After 15 Years Spent In UX Design (Part 1)

In this two-part series, Andrii Zhdan outlines common challenges faced at the start of a design career and offers advice to smooth your journey based on insights from his experience hiring designers. Learn why mastering design tools is crucial, how to build a strong portfolio, and tips for acing your first interviews.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

It’s Time To Talk About “CSS5”

Have you ever wondered what happened after CSS3? It’s common knowledge that we never saw CSS4 come after it, yet we have a plethora of new features that have no similar way of defining when they were introduced. The W3C CSS-Next community group is actively searching for better approaches for how we describe the evolution of CSS over time and identify feature sets as effectively as we did with CSS3 way back in 2009 — and you can help.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

Best Of Pro Scheduler Libraries

For teams working remotely across the globe or together in an office, as well as for any group of collaborating users, a scheduler can be a valuable tool indeed. In this post, you’ll find some of the best commercial web scheduler libraries (JavaScript based) with amazing UX and high efficiency that are currently available.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

If I Was Starting My Career Today: Thoughts After 15 Years Spent In UX Design (Part 2)

In this two-part series, Andrii Zhdan outlines common challenges faced at the start of a design career and offers advice to smooth your journey based on insights from his experience hiring designers. In Part 2, Andrii speaks about how you can grow faster in your brand-new junior UX job.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com

How To Defend Your Design Process

Ever felt pressure to speed up your design process? Here’s how to address unrealistic expectations and foster a shared understanding with stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned on the path to a successful delivery. Part of [Smart Interface Design Patterns](https://smart-interface-design-patterns.com) by yours truly.

read more...

www.smashingmagazine.com