Looking for a way to share location-based weather reports and forecasts with your website visitors? You’re going to need access to up-to-date, accurate weather data first – and Weatherstack…
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Nowadays, if you have a product, service, or brand that you want to “get out there” one of the best ways to do that is through influencers. But how…
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In this episode, we’re taking a look back at 2020. Who did we speak to in our episodes this year, and what did we learn? Let’s listen back to some clips to find out.
You can find all of our past episodes, including a full transcript of every interview at podcast.smashingmagazine.com.
See you in 2021, everyone! 😁
Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers
2019 has been quite a productive (sometimes challenging, but ultimately very successful) year for the Smashing team. In this annual round-up, I’d like to share some of my thoughts and those of some of the Smashing team, as we look back on the past year as well as look forward to 2020.
As always, my 2019 has involved a lot of travel. In addition to my conference speaking engagements and travel to W3C meetings, I attended all four of our Smashing conferences; I ran CSS Layout workshops in Toronto, New York and San Francisco. The conferences are a time when most of the team is together in person.
The home of Smashing is in Freiburg, Germany, and before SmashingConf Freiburg, we held a big team meeting, with almost everyone who is involved with Smashing able to take part. There have been many changes in the Smashing Team this year, and that meeting in Freiburg was a chance for us all to come together; I believe that it was one of the most valuable things we have done this year.
There are many challenges in doing all of the things we do as a small (mainly part-time and remote) team. However, if we keep talking and keep the Smashing community at the heart of everything we do, the past year demonstrates that we can achieve amazing things!
The SmashingConf team of Amanda Annandale, Charis Rooda and Mariona Jones are a force of nature. They seem to achieve the impossible and (as Charis told me) still have time to enjoy the surroundings of the places they visit.
I’m always blown away when I walk into the venue and see what has been achieved — even before the event starts. Artwork created by the very talented Ricardo Gimenes is everywhere — such as the movie posters from Toronto, and the artwork in the theater we use as a venue in New York.
One of my favorite things to do at the conferences is to lead the Smashing Run which we normally manage to do on both conference days. This is becoming quite a fixture, with several attendees and speakers running and chatting for half an hour before breakfast. I’m already looking forward to our inaugural run in Austin in 2020, although it may be a bit of a warm one!
I sometimes help the conference team out when words need writing or editing, and sometimes when the legality of balloons is called into question. As Amanda Annandale (Senior Event Manager) remembers:
“September marked my third year at Smashing, and while it provided a whole new set of challenges, it also provided a huge sense of accomplishments. The conference team sat down at the end of 2018 and was able to make some big plans for the future.
“It’s been amazing to see these plans (from organization to side-events to new locations), and our team, come together. But, new tasks can bring about some hilarious roadblocks. Smashing is on a long and necessary quest to reduce our carbon footprint. BUT, Vitaly is rather partial to balloons.
“For those who may not know (because Rachel Andrew and I were shocked to learn), foil balloons are heavily regulated in the state of California. This (we discovered while spending a disproportionate time researching eco-balloons over plastic balloons) is obviously bad for the environment. We’ve never been so happy to find a company making fully eco-friendly balloons, that are fully biodegradable in a very short amount of time! This experience definitely strengthened our resolve.
“We are now working with a company out of Austin to improve our printing processes to be more eco-friendly, and working with each of our caterers to reduce our waste. We still have a way to go, but we’re aiming for a Smashing impact in 2020!”
Conferences are expensive to produce and we are fortunate to have some wonderful partners who help us to create these events. They are looked after by our partnerships manager, Mariona Jones, who has been joined this year by Esther Fernández. Between them, they are working to bring together all of the Smashing properties in order to create new partnership opportunities. Mariona told me,
“The most exciting moment this year has been to be able to create together with the whole team the Smashing Media platform bringing together events, magazine, publishing house, membership and Smashing TV. The highlight of the year is undoubtedly the birth of the partnerships and data office and the addition to the Smashing Family of my dear colleague Esther.”
Esther adds,
“Joining the Smashing team has been one of the highlights of the year. It’s been a pleasure to enter this community and to make the Smashing conferences happen.”
I’m looking forward to working together with Mariona and Esther this year as we open up new opportunities for partnerships that cross the boundaries of the different parts of the platform!
The heart of what I do at Smashing is the online magazine; as Editor in Chief, my role here is to try to bring you web design and development content that will inform you, help with your day-to-day work, and also make you think. We publish almost every weekday, so always have a large list of articles moving through the writing, editing and publishing process.
Looking through our analytics, I pulled up a list of the most popular articles published in the last year. The range of topics making it to the top may surprise you, and demonstrate the wide range of subjects we cover here. We have the Front-End Performance Checklist, an article comparing Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD, and two articles about designing tables: Table Design Patterns On The Web and How To Architect A Complex Web Table. HTML and CSS are always popular with How To Align Things In CSS, How To Learn CSS and HTML5 Input Types: Where Are They Now? —all getting a top spot. They are joined by Styling An Angular Application With Bootstrap and Using Vue.js To Create An Interactive Weather Dashboard. That’s quite the range of subject matter!
Covering such a broad spectrum of web design and development is certainly a challenge and one I couldn’t do alone. My subject editors Alma Hoffmann, Chui Chui Tan, Drew McLellan and Michel Bozgounov bring their expertise to the topics they help curate. Copy editors Andrew Lobo and Owen Gregory help preserve the tone of voice of our authors while ensuring the content is easy to understand for an international audience. Cosima Mielke ensures that the newsletter is well researched along with many other roles (including eBook production), and Yana Kirilenko does a great job of getting articles from Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and various Markdown apps into the CMS. Senior editor Iris Lješnjanin does an amazing job of keeping everything on track, fielding the email, hitting publish on most of the pieces, and making sure that we are all using smashingly correct punctuation! I am very grateful for all of their work.
Vitaly and I are well-known faces in the web community, however, there is a whole cast of folk working behind the scenes to keep the magazine running successfully. I don’t say thank you enough, but I sincerely appreciate all the work that goes into the magazine across the team.
Smashing Magazine turned 13 this year to which I shared personal stories from the team — you can read more about the people behind the Smashing scenes over here.
This year, I’ve tried to bring the various facets of the business into the magazine. For example, each conference results in a set of high-quality videos of the presentations which was hidden away on Vimeo. This year, I’ve published a write-up of each event, listing all of the videos. I hope that this means more people can benefit from the wisdom of our speakers and also shows the brilliant work the conference team does in curating and putting on these events.
Something that I really enjoy is to publish articles by folks who have never written for a large publication before and to help their articles go through the process. Earlier this year, I wrote an article on Pitching Your Writing To Publications. If your 2020 goals include writing for Smashing Magazine, drop us a line with an outline of your idea. We would love to work with you!
In 2019, we published two printed books, plus our very first print magazine. Art Direction For The Web was published in the spring, and at the end of the year, we began shipping Inclusive Components.
In the middle of the launch of Inclusive Components, we welcomed a new team member, Ari Stiles. She told me,
“It was challenging and fun to start working on the Smashing Library right after Heydon’s book was released, when promotion was already in full swing. A bit like stepping in front of a firehose — but in a good way! It helps that Inclusive Components is a well-written, timely book. I love helping people discover new and helpful resources like this one, and I’m excited about all of our new books for 2020.”
Selecting a topic for our first print magazine was tricky. We wanted these magazines to be a snapshot of the industry at a certain time, but also to have a longer shelf life than tutorials on topics that will be out of date in a few months. Ultimately, for issue one, we chose a subject that was at the forefront of many minds in 2019 — that of ethics and privacy. The collection of essays I commissioned is designed to make you think, and we still have a few print copies and the digital version, if you would like to read them.
🎉 We’re currently in the planning stage for issue 2 — watch this space!
All of our books come with an eBook version, and one of Cosima Mielke’s many roles is to produce this version from the final manuscript. Memories of working on these projects were her response when I asked her about her 2019:
“As an eBook Producer, the moment when you’re being handed over the proofread manuscript to get started with eBook production is always a special moment. So many people — reviewers, proofreaders, and most importantly, the authors themselves, have already invested so much time and efforts into the manuscript, and now it’s your turn to put it into its final shape: the eBook that people are going to download and read.
“My personal highlight (and biggest challenge) this year was to turn the monumental opus that Andy provided with “Art Direction for the Web” into an eBook. The assets included almost 600 images — most of the designs created by Andy from scratch — and turning these into an eBook that does justice to the author’s meticulous work, provides a pleasant reading experience (given the rather limited possibilities that eBook reading devices usually offer), and has a reasonable file size at the same time, was quite a balancing act. Looking back, it was the most challenging eBook I have worked on to date — and, naturally, these kinds of projects make you feel proudest once you’ve accomplished them. I’m already curious to find out what 2020 will bring.”
For the first time this year, Smashing Magazine has a podcast. Hosted by Drew McLellan, this bi-weekly show interviews someone from the world of web design and development. We hope to bring you some well-known names, but also speak to folks doing interesting things across the industry.
In addition to having a very broad base of subject matter, Smashing has a global audience; we’d like to reflect that and bring you interviews from people all over the world. I asked Drew for his thoughts on these first few episodes:
“I was really pleased to be able to launch the Smashing Podcast this year. We spent quite a bit of time in development with it, trying to work out what the best format and tone to take would be. We tried to make it sound like Smashing and embody the same values; a good place to learn and stay informed, but with a sense of fun.
Our early guests have included experts such as Jina Ann, Liz Elcoate, and Jason Pamental. And we’ve spoken to authors of Smashing books Andy Clarke and Heydon Pickering.
The reception so far has been great, and you can always let us know what you think via the contact page. I’m looking forward to releasing episodes with the guests we have lined up for 2020!”
If you haven’t listened to an episode yet, you can catch up by subscribing here, or check out the individual episodes and full transcripts.
We love our Smashing Members! This year you have continued to sign up and support the publication of independent content. We’ve been running webinars (with the help of Scott Whitehead and Bethany Andrew where members get to chat with one another in our Membership Slack, while enjoying free copies of our eBooks, plus a copy of the print magazine! We’re really keen to build on and evolve membership over the next years, and we sincerely thank our members for their support.
We have been running a membership table at our event, where members and prospective members can chat with the team. Our partnership manager, Mariona Jones remembers,
“While running the membership table at SmashingConf, I met a group of attendees who shared their passion for many things, among them open-source, stickers, code, and caffeine while browsing together through the first-ever Smashing print magazine on ethics and privacy and conversing about the relevance of this important topic.”
That’s enough from me! Still, we can’t wrap up 2019 without some thoughts from Vitaly, without who Smashing would not exist at all.
“It’s common to think that it’s all about the achievements or goals that make a year special, but for me, this year was full of meeting wonderful people. So, so many people. I’ve had a chance to speak with hundreds of people all around the globe, learning from their experiences and sharing mine. I was lucky to travel to over 40 places this year, from Albania, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kyiv, Sweden and Budapest. I vividly remember some of the stories and experiences I shared over a fire in the evening, in cars on the way somewhere, and in buses talking to strangers I’ll never see again. These were extremely rewarding, valuable and precious moments for me. They are the ones that I’ll be looking back to years from now. In essence, it’s all about people in the end.
“It was wonderful to connect with some of our readers at New Adventures in Nottingham, InfoShare in Gdansk, Poland, BTConf in Dusseldorf, FrontEndUnited in Utrecht, Netherlands, YGLF in Vilnius, Lithuania, perf.now in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and so many others! That said, travel is not without drama. When I was on a short vacation in Albania, I ended up getting lost in the woods in the middle of nowhere at midnight. That was quite scary, but thanks to 6% on my phone and a hardly visible, remote McDonalds sign, I was able to get out in a few hours, returning to the hotel around 5 AM.
“I think that this year at Smashing we’ve learned what it really means to be a team. We had tough and difficult situations, but we pulled together in a respectful, kind and very supportive way, and we kept strong and we made it. It was a year full of challenges and adventures, but in the end, we’ve grown even closer together, and I’m very proud of our team for getting there. I’m also very proud of the fact that we have been exploring topics that are often not seen as particularly interesting nor trendy — accessibility, ethical design, privacy. At our conferences, for example, we’ve looked into common problems and issues that developers and designers struggle with, and tried to find solutions and common techniques to tackle them. It’s something that I strongly believe is important for the health of our industry, and I’m happy to see more discussions around these topics this year.
“My sincere hope is that we’ll establish an even stronger team filling in the gaps we currently have, and we’ll manage to create a very strong alignment within the company. I hope we’ll be able to reach out to more people — especially the new generation of designers and developers — and connect with them. I can’t wait for the books that we’ll be releasing next year as well! I have a number of ideas in mind of things I think we could do, but before jumping there, I want to make sure we are stable, healthy and strong. No rush — I’ve been patient my entire life.”
The whole team is looking forward to seeing what 2020 brings, and to sharing that with the Smashing Community — wherever you are in the world. Thank you for being part of our journey!
(il)
Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers
A ‘code review’ is a moment in the development process in which you (as a developer) and your colleagues work together and look for bugs within a recent piece of code before it gets released. In such a moment, you can be either the code author or one of the reviewers.
When doing a code review, you might not be sure of what you are looking for. On the other side, when submitting a code review, you might not know what to wait for. This lack of empathy and wrong expectations between the two sides can trigger unfortunate situations and rush the process until it ends in an unpleasant experience for both sides.
In this article, I’ll share how this outcome can be changed by changing your mindset during a code review:
Before we start, it’s fundamental to understand the value of why code needs to be reviewed. Knowledge sharing and team cohesion are beneficial to everyone, however, if done with a poor mindset, a code review can be a huge time consumer with unpleasant outcomes.
The team attitude and behavior should embrace the value of a nonjudgmental collaboration, with the common goal of learning and sharing — regardless of someone else’s experience.
A complete code review takes time. If a change took one week to be made, don’t expect the code review to take less than a day. It just doesn’t work like that. Don’t try to rush a code review nor look at it as a bottleneck.
Code reviews are as important as writing the actual code. As a team, remember to include code reviews in your workflow and set expectations about how long a code review might take, so everyone is synced and confident about their work.
An effective way to guarantee consistent contributions is to integrate a Pull Request template in the project. This will help the author to submit a healthy PR with a complete description. A PR description should explain what’s the change purpose, the reason behind it, and how to reproduce it. Screenshots and reference links (Git issue, design file, and so on) are the final touches for a self-explanatory submission.
Doing all of this will prevent early comments from reviewers asking for more details. Another way of making code reviews seem less nitpicky is to use linters to find code formatting and code-quality issues before a reviewer even gets involved. Whenever you see a repetitive comment during the review process, look for ways to minimize it (being with better guidelines or code automatization).
Anyone can do a code review, and everyone must receive a code review — no matter the seniority level. Receive any feedback gratefully as an opportunity to learn and to share knowledge. Look at any feedback as an open discussion rather than a defensive reaction. The amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning to be enjoyable. Stay humble because the second you stop being a student, your knowledge becomes fragile.
In my opinion, picking the reviewers is one of the most important decisions for an effective and healthy code review as a team.
Let’s say your colleague is submitting a code review and decides to tag “everyone” because, unconsciously, she/he might want to speed up the process, deliver the best code possible or making sure everyone knows about the code change. Each one of the reviewers receives a notification, then opens the PR link and sees a lot of people tagged as reviewers. The thought of “someone else will do it” pops up in their minds, leading to ignore the code review and close the link.
Since nobody started the review yet, your colleague will remind each one of the reviewers to do it, i.e. creating pressure on them. Once the reviewers start to do it, the review process takes forever because everyone has their own opinion and it’s a nightmare to reach a common agreement. Meanwhile, whoever decided to not review the code, is then spammed with zillions of e-mail notifications with all of the review comments, thus creating noise in their productivity.
This is something I see happening more than I’d like: Pull Requests with a bunch of people tagged as reviewers and ending, ironically, in a non-productive code review.
There are some common effective flows when selecting the reviewers: A possible flow is to pick two to three colleagues who are familiar with the code and ask them to be reviewers. Another approach, explained by Gitlab team is to have a chained review flow in which the author picks one reviewer who picks another reviewer until at least two reviewers agree with the code. Regardless of the flow you choose, avoid having too many reviewers. Being able to trust your colleagues’ code’s judgment is the key to conduct an effective and healthy code review.
Spotting pieces of code to improve is just a part of a successful code review. Just as important is to communicate that feedback in a healthy way by showing empathy towards your colleagues.
Before writing a comment, remember to put yourself in the other people’s shoes. It’s easy to be misunderstood when writing, so review your own words before sending them. Even if a conversation starts being ugly, don’t let it affect you — always stay respectful. Speaking well to others is never a bad decision.
When a discussion isn’t solved quickly, take it to a personal call or chat. Analyze together if it’s a subject worth paralyzing the current change request or if it can be addressed in another one.
Be flexible but pragmatic and know how to balance efficiency (delivering) and effectiveness (quality). It’s a compromise to be made as a team. In these moments I like to think of a code review as an iteration rather than a final solution. There’s always room for improvement in the next round.
Gathering the author and the reviewer together in a pair programming style can be highly effective. Personally, I prefer this approach when the code review involves complex changes or there’s an opportunity for a large amount of knowledge sharing. Despite this being an offline code review, it’s a good habit to leave online comments about the discussions taken, especially when changes need to be made after the meeting. This is also useful to keep other online reviewers up to date.
When a code review has suffered a lot of changes, took too long or has already had too many discussions, gather your team together and analyze the causes and which actions can be taken from it. When the code review is complex, splitting a future task into smaller tasks makes each code review easier.
When the experience gap is big, adopting pair programming is a strategy with incredible results — not only for knowledge sharing but also for off-line collaboration and communication. Whatever the outcome, always aim for a healthy dynamic team with clear expectations.
One of the main concerns when working on a code review as an author is to minimize the reviewer’s surprise when reading the code for the first time. That’s the first step to a predictable and smooth code review. Here’s how you can do it.
It’s never a bad idea to talk with your future reviewers before coding too much. Whenever it’s an internal or external contribution, you could do a refinement together or a little bit of pair programming at the beginning of the development to discuss solutions.
There’s nothing wrong in asking for help as a first step. In fact, working together outside the review is a first important step to prevent early mistakes and guarantee an initial agreement. At the same time, your reviewers get aware of a future code review to be made.
When submitting a Pull Request to be reviewed, remember to add a description and to follow the guidelines. This will save the reviewers from spending time to understand the context of the new code. Even if your reviewers already know what it is about, you can also take this opportunity as a way to improve your writing and communication skills.
Seeing your own code in a different context allows you to find things you would miss in your code editor. Do a code review of your own code before asking your colleagues. Have a reviewer mindset and really go through every line of code.
Personally, I like to annotate my own code reviews to better guide my reviewers. The goal here is to prevent comments related to a possible lack of attention and making sure you followed the contribution guidelines. Aim to submit a code review just as you would like to receive one.
After submitting a code review, don’t jump right into a new private message asking your reviewers to “take a look, it only takes a few minutes” and indirectly craving for that thumbs-up emoji. Trying to rush your colleagues to do their work is not a healthy mindset. Instead, trust your colleagues’ workflow as they trust you to submit a good code review. Meanwhile, wait for them to get back to you when they are available. Don’t look at your reviewers as a bottleneck. Remember to be patient because hard things take time.
Once a code review is submitted, comments will come, questions will be asked, and changes will be proposed. The golden rule here is to not take any feedback as a personal attack. Remember that any code can benefit from an outside perspective.
Don’t look at your reviewers as an enemy. Instead, take this moment to set aside your ego, accept that you make mistakes, and be open to learning from your colleagues, so that you can do a better job the next time.
When you are asked to be a reviewer, don’t interrupt things right away. That’s a common mistake I see all the time. Reviewing code demands your full attention, and each time you switch code contexts, you are decreasing your productivity by wasting time in recalibrating your focus. Instead, plan ahead by allocating time slots of your day to do code reviews.
Personally, I prefer to do code reviews first thing in the morning or after lunch before picking any other of my tasks. That’s what works best for me because my brain is still fresh without a previous code context to switch off from. Besides that, once I’m done with the review, I can focus on my own tasks, while the author can reevaluate the code based on the feedback.
When a Pull Request doesn’t follow the contribution guidelines, be supportive — especially to newcomers. Take that moment as an opportunity to guide the author to improve his/her contribution. Meanwhile, try to understand why the author didn’t follow the guidelines in the first place. Perhaps there’s room for improvement that you were not aware of before.
While reviewing the code, make it run on your own computer — especially when it involves user interfaces. This habit will help you to better understand the new code and spot things you might miss if you just used a default diff-tool in the browser which limits your review scope to the changed code (without having the full context as in your code editor).
When you don’t understand something, don’t be afraid to say it and ask questions. When asking, remember to first read the surrounding code and avoid making assumptions.
Most of the questions fit in these two types of categories:
Once you find a piece of code you believe it should be improved, always remember to recognize the author’s effort in contributing to the project and express yourself in a receptive and transparent way.
Instead of “Extract this method from here…” prefer “This method should be extracted…” or “What do you think of extracting this method…”
Unclear: “This code should be….”
Opinion: “I believe this code should be…”
Fact: “Following [our guidelines], this code should be…”.
Opinion: “I believe this code could be…”
Explained: “I believe this code could be (…) because this will improve readability and simplify the unit tests.”
Besides saying something such as “Using filter will help us to [motivation],” also say, “In this case, it could be something like: [snippet of code]. You can check [an example at Finder.js]. Any doubt, feel free to ping me on Slack.”
Avoid proposing code changes unrelated to the current code. Before suggesting a change, ask yourself if it’s strictly necessary at that moment. This type of feedback is especially common in refactors. It’s one of the many trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness that we need to make as a team.
When it comes to refactors, personally, I tend to prefer small but effective improvements. Those are easier to review and there’s less chance of having code conflicts when updating the branch with the target branch.
If you leave a code review half-done, let the author know about it, so time expectations are under control. In the end, also let the author know if you agree with the new code or if you would like to re-review it once again later.
Before approving a code review, ask yourself if you are comfortable about the possibility of touching that code in the future. If yes, that’s a sign you did a successful code review!
Although nobody admits it, sometimes you have to refuse a code review. The moment you decide to accept a code review but try to rush it, the project’s quality is being compromised as well as your team’s mindset.
When you accept to review someone’s else code, that person is trusting your capabilities — it’s a commitment. If you don’t have the time to be a reviewer, just say no to your colleague(s). I really mean it; don’t let your colleagues wait for a code review that will never be done. Remember to communicate and keep expectations clear. Be honest with your team and — even better — with yourself. Whatever your choice, do it healthily, and do it right.
Given enough time and experience, doing code reviews will teach you much more than just technical knowledge. You’ll learn to give and receive feedback from others, as well as make decisions with more thought put into it.
Each code review is an opportunity to grow as a community and individually. Even outside code reviews, remember to foster a healthy mindset until the day it comes naturally to you and your colleagues. Because sharing is what makes us better!
(ra, yk, il)
Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers
Kinsta is one of the most interesting hosting companies currently on the market. It provides a bold and new solution for a common problem: secure and scalable WordPress hosting….
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As we come to the end of 2018, I spoke to some of the Smashing team, to get some thoughts on what the past year has been like for Smashing Magazine. We’re a small and fully remote team, communicating via Slack and Notion. Many of us only work part-time for Smashing, however, in many ways, I think that is one of our strengths.
We’re not just the publishers of an online magazine or conference organizers, we are people who work in the web industry. Among the team, products have been launched, books are being written, conferences have been spoken at, and websites launched that have nothing to do with Smashing Magazine itself. I love that. It stops us being insular, and I hope this helps us to constantly broaden our reach — bringing people together from all over the world to share ideas and inspiration as we all work together to build a better web.
As Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine, I look after the content that goes out on the online magazine, and also our upcoming print magazine for members. This year, we have published almost every weekday — that represents over 290 articles! That’s a whole lot of content on subjects from privacy and accessibility to CSS and WordPress. While I read every article that goes out, I do not have the expertise to know everything about all of these subjects. I couldn’t do my job without the help of our talented editors who work with individual authors: Alma Hoffmann (Design), Chui Chui Tan (UX Design), Drew McLellan (Coding), Jim Dabell (Mobile), Marko Dugonjić (Typography), Michel Bozgounov (Graphics), and Rey Bango (Coding). Plus thanks to Iris Lješnjanin, Markus Seyfferth, Yana Kirilenko, Cosima Mielke, Andrew Lobo and Ricardo Gimenes for their hard work and efforts.
On a personal note, this year has once again involved a lot of travel, as I continue to tour around speaking about new CSS and CSS Layout. That has included talks and workshops for Smashing. In total (with speaking engagements, workshops and CSS Working Group meetings), I have traveled 272,865 kilometers while visiting 45 cities and 15 countries. That amounts to spending 146 days on the road.
Here’s a fun fact: My weekly standup post in our Smashing Slack usually starts with sharing the timezones I’m going to be in that week. Well, next year will involve more travel, and I’ll be bringing my new CSS Layout workshop to San Francisco, Toronto, and New York.
As for the magazine, I hope we can continue to publish great content from authors — those who are experienced writers but also folks writing for the first time. We are very happy to work with you to shape an article for publication. Personally, writing has helped boost my career more than anything else I have done. I love to help other people get started. So, if you have an idea, read this and then send over an outline.
Please don’t hesitate. Some of our most popular posts have been beginner guides to a technology, so don’t feel you need to have solved a big problem, or have some brand new technique in order to contribute. A nice technique, demonstrated and explained well, is worth a lot to someone who has just hit that same issue.
Anyway, enough from me! What were the highlights of the year for everyone else here at Smashing?
2018 was a quite busy and adventurous year for me, with a good number of ups and downs, challenges, surprises, and rewards. I was honored to have had the opportunity to run trainings, workshops and even offer consultancy to the European Parliament, EPAM, OTTO, Sipgate, Axel Springer and Wondrous, among others. I was happy to support dozens of local meet-ups and conferences around the world with the kind help of our Smashing Members.
Earlier this year, I explored how we can improve the level of education for front-end and design. While speaking at universities and schools, I was also teaching to get a sense of what’s required to set up a proper design school. In February, I taught at the New Digital School in Porto, Portugal, for a week, while exploring the state of front-end and responsive interface design in a class of 20 students. In June, I helped dear friends from the Projector Design School in Kyiv, Ukraine, set up Berlin Design Campus, an initiative for Ukrainian students to explore how digital agencies and designers work and live in Berlin. In October, I participated in a week-long co-working co-living campus in Mokrin, Serbia.
Specifically, I was exploring the state of design and front-end in uncommon locations, mostly second- and third-largest cities: Porto and Braga in Portugal (thanks Tiago!), Yerevan in Armenia (thanks Sona and Sargis!), Gdansk in Poland (thanks Patrycja!), Salzburg in Austria (thanks Markus!), Moscow and Saint Petersburg in Russia (thanks Julia, Daria, Alex, Andrey, Vadim and Alexey!), Split and Labin in Croatia (thanks Toni, Antonio and Domagoj!), Belgrade and Mokrin in Serbia (thanks Tatjana and Marija!), Belfast in Northern Ireland (thanks Tash and Oliver!), Manila in Philippines (thanks Sophia!), Tallinn in Estonia (thanks Artur!).
Much of the time in the second half of the year was spent with wonderful people at the European Parliament in Brussels, where Nicolas and Manuel were kind enough to invite me to work on refinements and improvements of UIs for election sites, media library, and a few smaller sites. That was quite a bit of traveling, with the absolute worst highlight of the last years being a massively delayed 47-hour trip to the Philippines due to a closed runway at the Manila airport (thanks for bearing with me through this, dear Sophia and the crew!)
Over the course of the year, I have spoken at 17 conferences, and was privileged to meet many — many! — remarkable people. It ended up with conversations I will remember for years to come. Some of these conversations changed me for the better as a person and professional, so I was happy to receive constructive criticism on MCing skills, writing, as well as code and design. I managed to wrap my head around the intricacies of CSS Grid Layout and Service Workers but also spent a lot of time learning about network protocols and the underlying layers of the Internet. I also attended 6 workshops to stay afloat of what’s happening in our industry these days and sharpened up my front-end/UX/communication skills. In September, I was honored to participate in the Mozilla Tech Speakers coaching, along with Ada Rose Edwards and Marc Thiele, mentoring and giving feedback to dozens of new speakers (here’s a review of the event by Havi Hoffman).
In terms of the Smashing Universe, we spent quite a bit of time revising our workflows and streamlining our processes for conferences, books, and the Smashing Membership. With fantastic event management skills of Mariona Ciller, Amanda Tamny Annandale and Charis Rooda, we’ve run 5 conferences this year: in London, San Francisco, Toronto, Freiburg and New York.
For the first time, we experimented with a ’no-slides’ format in Toronto (every speaker presented “live” on stage in front of a large screen shwoing how they build and design — with performance and accessibility audits to live designing/coding/sketching sessions on stage. In fact, that’s the format we are going to continue exploring in 2019.
Editor’s Note: If this format sounds interesting to you, you can watch all of the SmashingConf talks on Vimeo.
After many months of work, we finally published “Smashing Book 6” and “Form Design Patterns” by Adam Silver, but quite a bit of time was spent on the next upcoming books that will be published in the next years. For the Membership, we were able to secure Scott Whitehead and Bruce Lawson to help evolve the Membership program.
On a more personal level, I will vividly remember vacations to Morocco (Marrakesh, Fez and the Sahara desert trip) and Sardinia (Northern part) earlier this year. Also, on a sad note, I’ve moved out from Vilnius, Lithuania, where I’ve resided for the past 3 years.
Overall, I see 2018 as an important “transitional” year which took a lot of time, effort, and hard work. It feels like it’s been a transitional year between how things used to be and what’s coming up next. With this in mind, I couldn’t be more excited to see what 2019 will bring us! Expect a few new books coming up, Smashing Magazine Print edition, four Smashing Conferences (San Francisco, Toronto, Freiburg, New York) and many wonderful Smashing TV sessions!
Change happens everywhere and all the time — in all organizations, agencies, and businesses. If you don’t thrive change on your own, then there comes a time when change takes place on its own and things get out of control.
Looking back on the year 2018, we’ve undergone changes to even better fit the needs of our readers. We published the Smashing Book 6: New Frontiers in Web Design, a book packed into the probably the most beautiful cover that we have had designed so far. It’s a book that sheds light on all kinds of upcoming challenges that await web designers and developers in the near future.
We also published Form Design Patterns, a book that focusses on building all sorts of accessible and resilient web forms, and how to make them pretty (thanks to progressive enhancement) — a book that I personally learned a lot from. We’ve also started working on two new books that we’ll be publishing early next year: “Art Direction on the Web” by Andy Clarke, and “Inclusive Components” by Heydon Pickering. I am eagerly looking forward to holding both of them in my hands!
At the end of last year, we did something that we usually wouldn’t do because it would be too much of a risk. We launched a fully redesigned site: we migrated the entire magazine, the Job Board, and our Smashing Shop onto a new platform, and also launched our Membership initiative to reduce advertising on the site and to make Smashing more independent from ads in the long run. All of this took place at the same time. Was it worth it? A definite “Yes!” We’ve seen a noticeable uptrend in our analytics and many positive outcomes. At around mid-2018, we had already crossed the 1,000 members mark, and we look forward to breaking the next big mark in the next year (always with the long-term goal of getting fully independent within the next three years)!
That’s right; Smashing Membership continues to evolve. In the upcoming months, we’ll be introducing a new print magazine for our Members — something that is both visually appealing and also most useful to read. Rachel will be building the print magazine mostly with print.css, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how this will turn out and whether we can reuse some of it for our upcoming books!
And that’s not the only sort of change that is still ongoing at Smashing. We also tried a new live coding and design conference format at this year’s SmashingConf in Toronto; we thought that the old format had gotten a bit too much of the same, something that makes SmashingConf a bit too similar with what others already do. After all, we want to run conferences that contain content that we ourselves find most useful and interesting, and the new live format brings precisely that! It did take quite a bit of a risk though, and we’re thrilled that it turned out to be a tremendous success! So we are going to double down with this new format in the next year.
Last but not least, we also moved our smashingconf.com site to Netlify just recently, but that happened mostly in the background, so if no one really noticed the change, I guess that’s a good thing.
Yes, 2018 was a year full of transitions, but I guess you never can afford to stand still anyway? 😉
Before the end of the first year of Smashing Membership, we reached a thousand members — thank you so much, everyone! Those extra-special people who were with us for the whole year received a little thank you in the post.
I joined Scott in October, which allowed us to increase the number of Smashing TV webinars (which are free to Members and Smashing Members, of course). We’ve had sessions on coding Machine Learning, Designing with Ethics, the State of the Web in South-East Asia, and statistical techniques for collecting user data without compromising privacy. (All are recorded and available to members, if you have FOMO!)
When we set up Membership, we promised that it would be an inclusive place where lesser-heard voices (in addition to big names) would be beamed straight to your living room/ home office/ sauna over Smashing TV. While we’ve been speaking at other non-Smashing events, we’ve watched other sessions from lesser-known talents in our industry. With only $ 5 to $ 9 a month, your Membership subscription allows us to bring you even greater content, pay all our contributors fairly, and reduce advertising on the site.
Next year, we’ll be increasing the number of webinars again. Lined up is a course on how to make Progressive Web Apps, Internationalization, Semantic HTML, Houdini, as well as a monthly show hosted by me and Vitaly with industry guests. We sincerely hope you’ll join us!
2018 was a year of firsts, new cities, new attendees, new speakers, and even a couple new formats. We had more than a few challenges in store, but if you have any experience with the Smashing Team, you’ll know that we thrive on challenges.
We started the year in London (our first time in the capital city and the first time in England in a couple of years). The sold-out conference took place in LSO’s St. Luke’s Church, and bathed in sunlight. This performance-based conference brought in a new crowd of attendees and speakers — all discussing why Performance Matters, the common pitfalls, and the tips and tricks for improving the day to day user experience. With Una Kravets and Patrick Hamman as MCs, the experience was new and empowering.
In April, the Smashing team headed back to San Francisco. The weather was wonderful as we returned to the bay, with 14 speakers, 8 workshops, and nearly 500 attendees. Held at the Palace of Fine Arts, Mina Markham walked us through the process of redesigning Slack, while Joe Leech broke down the process of “Designing Powerful User Experiences With Psychology.” We toured the area, competed with each other at the arcade, and came together to find new ways to solve new processes and challenges.
A couple of months later, SmashingConf experimented with its boldest change: no slides! All of the presenters, from Aaron Draplin to Rachel Andrew, tossed out their ‘normal’ presentation format and showed the attendees how they work. The experience was enlightening, showing how similar we all are in our work processes in some ways, while approaching things from an entirely different angle in others. In fact, we loved it so much that we’ve decided 2019 should be the year of No Slides!
The end of the summer is when Smashing goes home. Set on the foothills of the Black Forest, at the infamous Markethall, SmashingConf came back to Freiburg, Germany with 14 speakers. Chui Chui Tan spoke about Designing for Global Audiences while Josh Clark talked about Design in the Era of the Algorithm. In addition, we had a new experience adding community lightning talks to our program. No matter what changes though, there’s nothing like hosting SmashingConf Freiburg and bringing people to our home.
And finally, we ended the year in the city that never sleeps — and lived up to the name! In New York City, we had 14 speakers, 8 workshops, a packed speaker panel, a couple of retro parties, and events that kept everyone busy for four days. Smashing challenged the sold-out audience with an engaging group of speakers from John Maeda to Debbie Millman and Sara Soueidan. No matter how many times we go back, the experiences always change us in a way.
But, then again, that’s how the Smashing team always feels at the end of a season: challenged, moved, and driven. We’ve learned from over 30 speakers, met over 1500 attendees, flown to 5 cities, eaten lots of incredible food, and had countless wonderful experiences. Now, the team is ready to create, improve, and progress to see what 2019 has in store for us!
If you ask me, I think that this year went by really quickly. When I look back, I see five Smashing conferences, which took place in London, San Francisco, Toronto, Freiburg and New York, as well as many improvements which we’ve achieved in the background.
Editor’s note: Marc has taken photos of many of our conferences, you can find the albums on his Flickr account.
When I say background, I mean that maybe readers, attendees or folks who visit Smashing Magazine don’t even recognize the work we do behind the curtains. Of course, there are final products that are presented in the articles published on Smashing Magazine, the Smashing Books, or projects that have been brought to your attention via Smashing TV or while attending a Smashing conference or workshops, but there is a small team of people who work hard to continue improving workflows and experiences for our cherished customers. What you often don’t see is see the messy middle and the bumpy journey we are on — from talking about a new idea to the final product. There actually is a lot of work, a lot of failure, and many discussions and conversations involved.
From the end of April onwards, we had many meetings and conversations to see where we can improve the work that we do. Defining clear roles and tasks, checking how the many different parts of the Smashing Universe can grow closer together, and also looking for new, exciting ideas to bring to life. There are also many new faces on board of the Smashing boat — fresh energy to move forward — and I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of their passion and input. Expect the quality you know from the magazine and the events and an even better Smashing Membership, Smashing TV, and maybe the one or other new idea.
So, when I personally speak about 2018, I tend to say that this year was not too good and felt strange for a reason that I can’t really grab and describe. Perhaps it is the overall mood and spirit that comes from what you see when you turn on the news, read the newspaper in the morning or talk to your neighbor? All I know is that it is important to stay positive and have a positive look into the future. I ran three very successful beyond tellerrand shows in Munich, Dusseldorf and Berlin, and I’ve seen the success we had with all the Smashing conferences and the improvements we’ve accomplished for the overall Smashing experience.
My wish for the upcoming new year: let’s meet — even more. Let’s share ideas and what we’ve learned. Let’s not just meet on the web, but in real life. It is wonderful to teach and share and to see other people taking what they’ve learned from you and take it further to create, inspire and teach others with it. One more thing that also is important: Stay curious and ask questions. Never fear to ask a question as you “might look stupid asking.” If you have a question, then it’s stupid not to ask.
With this, I wish everyone a wonderful journey over to 2019 and I am looking forward to meeting you in 2019!
Working at Smashing Magazine has been a very rewarding experience. Each time one of the articles I have edited gets published, I think I am happier than the authors.
One article, in particular, that was very meaningful to me was written by Trine Falbe and titled “Ethical Design The Practical Getting-Started Guide.” We all talk about ethical design, but not often we are provided with a way to get started. It is a good article to reflect upon as the current year ends and the new starts.
Thank you, Smashing, for keeping me around!
Reading all of this certainly makes me proud to be part of the Smashing team. At the heart of everything Smashing, is an absolute focus on you, our readers, members, and conference attendees. We hope that the things we do demonstrate that, and we are always happy to listen and to learn when we get it wrong!
I’m excited for the things we will be sharing in 2019, and along with all of the team I am always happy to hear your feedback. What can we do better? What do you want to learn? How can we help? We will be opening up a survey for some more formal feedback early in 2019, but our door (or email inbox at least) is always open!
(il)
Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers
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(This is a sponsored article.) The modern web is very unified. Designers use the same patterns, and, as a result, websites created by different people look like clones. The only way to stand out from the crowd is via content. Content is what brings people to your website in the first place.
Tilda is a website builder that can be used to create websites, landing pages, online stores and special projects. Tilda’s creators practice a “content-first” philosophy: Content precedes design. Being big fans of storytelling, they came up with block mechanics for creating websites, so that users not just create web pages, but also tell stories about their products or services. And it helps to turn visitors to customers more effectively.
This article is a story of how Tilda differs from other website builders and how it helps you focus on what you know and love, without having to think about technical stuff — because you often don’t have time to learn technical things. Below are a few key benefits of using Tilda to create websites.
When designers make websites, they often have to implement the same objects over and over again. This not only makes the design process tedious, but also takes up valuable time.
To solve this problem, the Tilda team created blocks, which are commonly used modules. This modular editing mechanism is at the core of the platform. When you create a website, you don’t need to use a hardcoded template; all you need to do is choose predesigned blocks that satisfy your requirements.
You have access to a library of 450 blocks. This library is updated constantly. To facilitate navigation between blocks, Tilda organizes them into categories. Each block in a collection is categorized either by function (for example, cover) or by meaning (for example, product reviews, “our team”, etc.).
All blocks have been created by professional designers, so you don’t need to worry about the core design properties. Also, all blocks work harmoniously together, so you don’t need to worry about how to adjust one block to another.
You might be thinking, “Does this mean that all websites created using blocks will look like clones?” No. Think of a block as a skeleton: It gives you something to modify according to your own needs. Tilda gives you a lot of control over the details. Almost everything in a block is adjustable.
Tilda allows you to customize blocks using the content and settings areas. Click on the “Content” button to edit all of the information that a block contains. The “Settings” button allows you to adjust different parameters, such as the visual appearance of a block. If you want to change the text, click on it and change it directly on the screen. To replace a picture, simply drag it from the folder on your computer.
The following are the biggest advantages of using blocks:
No matter how rich a default collection of blocks is, some users will always want to create something truly unique. Precisely for this case, Tilda provides a Zero Block editor: a built-in editor for creating your own blocks. Think of it as a graphic editor for your website that lets you explore your creativity: add text, shape, button, image, video, tooltip, form, even insert HTML code; move, transform and hide every element on the canvas. You can start from scratch and create new unique blocks!
All you need to do to start using the editor is to click the “Zero” button on a newly created page. Zero Block allows you to manage every detail of your design. You can change the style options for objects, change their position, change their size and more.
Here is how this process looks:
Just like regular Blocks, Zero Blocks are adaptive. Tilda provides five modes for adapting content to different screen sizes. You can preview a design in the following screen modes:
Zero Block can be used together with existing blocks. It’s possible to convert an existing block into a Zero Block and modify it however you like.
Animation brings a sense of interactivity to the user experience. Properly incorporated, animation make a website’s elements come alive. There a lot of different ways in which adding motion can benefit users. For example, you can use animation to focus the user’s attention on a particular object (such as by assigning a specific animated effect to a call-to-action button to direct the user’s attention to that element) or for purely aesthetic purposes (such as to create a sense of craftsmanship).
Tilda allows you to create stunning interactive pages without any code. Tilda provides three types of animation, which we’ll go over now.
In all standard blocks, you can adjust the appearance of any element to make the website more alive and interesting. For example, you can add an animated effect for a cover title.
Animations work in all blocks, except for the slider. All you need to do to add an animated effect is simply select the desired effect in the block settings.
With Tilda, you can also create a step-by-step animation where any element of the page can be a part of motion sequence. Tilda allows you to set the trajectory of elements. You can implement complex behaviors for elements on the page and add maximum interactivity.
In addition to the appearance effects, you can adjust parallax and fixing. Parallax enables objects to move at different speeds when users scroll a page. Fixing allows you to fix an object on the screen during the scroll. You can play with following parameters: speed, duration, delay, event triggers for starting the animation.
Here is a quick video that demonstrates how to create a complex animated effect.
Those blocks are designed to add animation effects. You can also create animation using special blocks, such as:
While templates and blocks sound pretty similar to each other, they are different. Templates are for common use cases (such as landing pages for businesses, event pages, blogs, etc.); they can be used as a base and later changed according to your own style. Choose a template that’s most relevant to your project, and customize it according to your preferences. Unlike many other website builders, Tilda doesn’t force users to select a template from a list. It’s entirely up to you whether to use a template or start with a blank slate.
It’s also possible to design your own template. All you need to do is design your own page and save it as a template. You can share the template with others.
The web has over 1 billion websites and is continually growing. All of those websites are competing for visitors. In today’s competitive market, search engine optimization (SEO) &mdash improving a website’s rankings in search results — is more important than ever, and it’s become a critical task of web designers.
The great news about Tilda is that it’s a search-engine-friendly platform; websites created with Tilda are automatically indexed by search engines. A robots.txt file (which contains special instructions for search engine robots) and a sitemap.xml file (which lists the URLs of the website) are generated automatically.
Users can improve search results using special settings:
alt tags for images).h1, h2 and h3 tags. The h1 heading carries the most weight for search engines.Users have access to Tilda’s “Webmaster Dashboard”. This tool tests a website against basic recommendations from search engines and identifies errors that would affect indexing. The tool is available in “Site Settings” → “Analytics and SEO” → “Tilda Webmaster Dashboard”. Users can click “Check Pages” in “Critical Errors and Recommendations” to see which pages need work.
If you want specific recommendations on SEO optimization, consider reading the guide to SEO by Tilda.
95% of the information on the web is written language. As Oliver Reichenstein states in his article “Web Design Is 95% Typography”: Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance.
I’ve already mentioned that Tilda has a strong focus on typography, but it is worth saying a few words about the font collection. Fonts have a direct impact on a website’s aesthetics. Tilda users have access to a rich font collection. Tilda integrates with Google Fonts and Typekit. Users can use distinctive fonts such as Futura, Formular, Geometria, Circe, Kazimir and others provided by Rentafont.
The primary goal of the business is creating and keeping customers. And one of the main tools that allow business to work with it customers is forms. Forms allow customers to send applications and feedback, or subscribe to mailing list. Using Tilda, you can create vertical, horizontal, pop-up, and step-by-step forms. The library has a separate category with ready-made design options.
In vertical forms, you can add an unlimited number of fields. For each field you can choose its type: drop-down list, checkbox, phone number, file attachment, etc. Tida provides a few special form fields such as ‘Split’ and ‘Calculator.’ The ‘Split’ field allows you to divide the form into a few steps. The ‘Calculator’ field allows you to calculate the cost using a specific formula and shows the cost to the visitor before sending. This can be extremely useful for e-commerce websites (during product purchase).
Tilda integrates with various data-receiving services. It helps you solve common problems with data collection, such as:
Tilda has a built-in constructor for emails which allows you to create a nice looking email from blocks in no time. You can connect MailChimp, UniSender, SendGrid services and send mail directly from the Tilda interface. If you use other email services, email builder still can be useful for you — you can download HTML code of a template created in Tilda and use it in your service.
Tilda has built-in analytics that show basic measurements of a website’s effectiveness: page views, page conversions, visitor engagement, etc. These key performance indicators satisfy the basic needs of users. It’s possible to view high-level details (general performance) and page-specific data.
Tilda users can view source, medium and campaign tags in the UTM table. If you click the tag itself, you will be taken to a page where you can see statistics linked to this parameter, such as visitors, sessions, leads and a detailed view by day.
While Tilda analytics will cover you in 90% of cases, sometimes you need more data. At such times, you might need to switch to Google Analytics. Tilda allows you to connect Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to monitor your website’s traffic. You don’t need to code in order to add Google counters to your pages; simply add your account to the page settings when setting up Analytics tracking.
Building online stores is one of the most common tasks of web designers. Unlike with other types of websites, web designers need to not only create a great design but also integrate with payment gateways. The great news is that Tilda has built-in e-commerce tools that enable you to build a small online stores in minutes, not hours or days.
Tilda’s users can add a shopping cart to their website. The cart widget is universal, and you can use it to sell both goods and services. The cart is integrated with the order form, which you can customize as you want. Simply add the fields you need, and you’ll get the information you need.
The order form is very user-friendly. Visitors will be able to add a number of products and change the quantity of a product. You can modify checkout form wherever you like — for example, you can add a few different delivery options and/or a special field for promo codes. The final sum is calculated automatically. After successful payment, the customer will receive an email with order details (this feature is configured in the payment systems settings).
Receiving payment online might seem like a problem. But with Tilda, you don’t need to worry. Setting up payment gateways is very easy. All you need to do is choose your preferred way of taking payments: credit card, PayPal or Stripe. The order details will come to your email, Google Drive or CRM — you can connect any data reception service.
Tilda provides a few excellent features for web developers:
script and style tags.Tilda isn’t just a website builder. It’s also a powerful cloud-based platform for publication. Websites created using Tilda can be published on Tilda’s servers or exported to yours. Below are a few benefits of using Tilda’s publication platform.
With Tilda, you don’t need to pay for hosting. Tilda guarantees a high loading speed and DDoS protection.
The high loading speed is provided by the content delivery network (CDN), which is used to store images. All websites created on Tilda have lazy-loading enabled by default. This allows content to be downloaded very quickly, even on mobile devices.
Assigning a unique address to your website is easy. Just go to “Project Settings” → “Domain”, and put your domain name in the “Custom Domain” field.
Tilda provides free HTTPS for its users. Installing an SSL certificate is relatively easy. Go to “Settings” → “Analytics and SEO” → “Tilda Webmaster Panel” → “HTTPS Settings”, and generate your free certificate.
Now that you know what Tilda is and what features it has, it’s time to discuss how web designers can use this tool. According to Tilda’s team, the tool is used for a few purposes:
Tilda’s team also collects the best examples of websites built using the tool on its inspiration page. Below are a few inspiring websites that were designed with Tilda.
You can also read what people say about Tilda on the Capterra and Product Hunt (Tilda became Product of the day in 2016)
Tilda helps you to display high-quality images, videos and text in a fully customizable gallery. “Visual Trends 2018” by Deposit Photos is an excellent example of how to present visual information interestingly and engagingly.
When it comes to creating web pages for events, it’s essential to present a lot of information in a logical and easy-to-scan way. Check out UX Sofia 2018, a website for a UX conference. It combines different information, such as the main talks and workshops, information about speakers, and the location, in easy-to-scan chunks.
The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into customers. A lot of factors can affect conversions, but it’s clear that better-designed landing pages outperform competitors. Check Metric.ai’s landing page, which has a tool that estimates a project’s profitability.
In the modern world, the first interaction between a customer and business happens online. People visit a website and decide whether they want to do business with that company. Design plays a vital role in the decision. When a website looks fresh and modern, there’s a better chance that people will work with the company. Quantum Attorneys uses a lot of popular visual effects (vibrant colors, duotones, attention-grabbing typography) to create a truly unique feel for visitors.
People often come to a website for inspiration. Inspiration can come in many forms. But sometimes, a relatively simple design can arouse a lot of emotions. White space is one of the most significant aspects of design. Check out Buro247’s project called Silent Rebellion Fashion. The black and white aesthetic paired with the white space create a unique feel.
Tilda has both free and paid plans:
Tilda has both free and paid plans:
Whatever website you want to create, whether it be a landing page, an online store or a personal blog, your goal is to make the content and design work together harmoniously and play off each other. With Tilda, it’s become much easier to achieve that harmonious balance.
Register in the platform today and try all the features yourself.
(ms, ra, al, yk, il)
Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers
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