Trends
For the designers and interested clients out there, below are some recent articles on trends in the web design industry.
Research isn’t everything. Facts alone don’t win arguments, but powerful stories do. Here’s how to turn your research into narratives that inspire trust and influence decisions.
www.smashingmagazine.com
A simple but powerful mental model for working with AI: treat it like an enthusiastic intern with no real-world experience. Paul Boag shares lessons learned from real client projects across user research, design, development, and content creation.
www.smashingmagazine.com
Motion can be tricky: too much distracts, too little feels flat. Ambient animations sit in the middle. They’re subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In part two of his series, web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows how ambient animations can add personality to any website design.
www.smashingmagazine.com
Here is a lesson on Iterators. Iterables implement the iterable iteration interface, and iterators implement the iterator iteration interface. Sounds confusing? Mat breaks it all down in the article.
www.smashingmagazine.com
The new month is just around the corner, and that means: It’s time for some new desktop wallpapers! All of them are designed by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!
www.smashingmagazine.com
With component variants, design systems become more flexible, letting you reuse the same component while adapting its look or state with ease. In this article, Daniel Schwarz demonstrates how design tokens can be leveraged to manage components and their variations using Penpot, the open-source tool built for scalable, consistent design.
www.smashingmagazine.com
Let’s dive into the building blocks of UX strategy and see how it speaks the language of product and business strategy to create user value while achieving company goals. Part of the Measure UX & Design Impact(use the code 🎟IMPACTto save 20% off today).
www.smashingmagazine.com
SVG is one of those web technologies that’s both elegant and, at times, infuriating. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke explains his technique for animating SVG elements that are hidden in the Shadow DOM.
www.smashingmagazine.com
There are lots of tips for [improving your website performance](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/improve-website-performance?utm_campaign=sm-10). But even if you follow all of the advice, are you able to maintain an optimized site? And are you targeting the right pages? Matt Zeunert outlines an effective strategy for web performance optimization and explains the roles that different types of data play in it.
www.smashingmagazine.com
There are many existing web features and technologies in the wild that you may never touch directly in your day-to-day work. Perhaps you’re fairly new to web development and are simply unaware of them because you’re steeped in the abstraction of a specific framework that doesn’t require you to know it deeply, or even at all. Bryan Rasmussen looks specifically at XPath and demonstrates how it can be used alongside CSS to query elements.
www.smashingmagazine.com