🧩 Imagine that you need to improve the UX of a legacy system. It’s slow, unreliable, and severely outdated — a “black box” that everyone relies on but no one fully understands. There’s no single way to fix it, but there are ways to make steady progress: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/lega...
🎯 We often see design principles as rigid guidelines that dictate design decisions. In reality, they are an incredible tool for rallying teams around a shared purpose and capturing the values an organization embodies. But how do we choose the right ones? www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/prac...
🌐 In an era with more data and better tools than ever, internal search experiences are often so poor that users prefer global search engines just to find a single page on a site. Why does the “Big Box” win, and how can we bring users back? www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/site...
✨ Accessibility works best when it blends into everyday workflows — not a big transformation, but simple processes that stick. With Figma variables, testing font size increases becomes part of the design flow, making accessibility feel almost inevitable: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/test...
🧩 Dropdowns often work perfectly until they’re placed inside a scrollable panel, where they can get clipped, and half the menu disappears behind the container’s edge.
↬ Godstime Aburu explains why this happens and offers practical solutions to fix it: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/drop...
✨ You’ve probably been there before. How do you choose between showing a modal to users and navigating them to a separate, new page? And does it even matter?
www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/moda...
🎬⚡ Design isn’t only pixels and patterns. It’s pacing and feelings, too. Alan Cohen explores Emotion in Flow vs. Emotion in Conflict, showing how anime and Marvel/DC films handle emotional shifts and what product design can learn from them: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/anim...
⏱️ Almost any JavaScript application works with dates or times in some capacity. From the built-in Date API to Moment.js, and now to the new Temporal standard.
Here are practical “recipes” for migrating Moment-based code to the new Temporal API: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/movi...
✨ Once upon a time, rounded corners meant five background images. Then border-radius arrived. Now, the corner-shape property takes CSS corners one step further, opening the door to beveled, scooped, and squircle corners: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/beyo...
Some forms stay UI. Others quietly become rule engines. 🎨⚙️
Why do these two approaches exist? And how do you choose between them? www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/buil...
🧩 Many product teams still lean on usability tweaks to address weak activation, drop-offs, and low retention – only to see results plateau or slip into shallow gamification.
↬ A decade later, Anders Toxboe updates persuasive design for today’s reality: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/pers...
♻️ Every high-resolution hero image, autoplay video, and complex JS animation carries a cost. Sustainable UX challenges the era of “unlimited pixels” and reframes performance as responsibility: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/02/desi...
🚀 Prescriptive class name conventions are no longer enough to keep CSS maintainable in a world of increasingly complex interfaces. Can the new @scope rule finally give developers the confidence to write CSS that can keep up with modern front ends? www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/02/css-...
✨ So what’s the difference between combobox, multiselect, listbox, and dropdown? While all these UI components might appear similar, they serve different purposes.
↬ Let’s see how they differ, what purpose they serve, and how to choose the right one: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/02/comb...
🎯 Developing effective agentic AI requires a new research playbook. When systems plan, decide, and act on our behalf, UX moves beyond usability testing into the realm of trust, consent, and accountability. Here’s how to design these systems responsibly: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/beyo...
🧩 In CSS, stacking contexts are incredibly useful, but they’re also widely misunderstood and cause layout headaches.
↬ Learn how elements are “stacked” on a webpage, what controls the stacking order, and how to “unstack” them when needed: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/unst...
🚀 It’s 2026. The web is faster, more fluid, and more powerful than ever. Yet we’re still chasing “pixel perfect.”
↬ Amit Sheen questions this legacy concept, explaining why it’s failing us and redefining what “perfection” actually looks like: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/reth...
🎨 Relative colour doesn’t just make theming easier. It changes how we think about colour. Like motion, it becomes intentional.
↬ Andy Clarke shows how CSS relative colour values can theme and animate SVGs, where changing one value transforms an entire scene: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/smas...
✨ How to shape your career path for 2026, with decision trees for designers and a UX skills self-assessment matrix.
↬ The only limits for tomorrow are the doubts we have today: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/ux-p...
Penpot is experimenting with MCP servers 🤖🎨
What if AI could understand and interact directly with your Penpot design files?
Here’s how Penpot MCP servers work, what they could mean for creating and managing designs, and how you can help shape their future: www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/01/penp...
✨ CSS Wrapped 2025 is out! We’re entering a world where CSS can increasingly handle logic, state, and complex interactions once reserved for JavaScript.
↬ Here’s an unpacking of the highlights and how they connect to the broader evolution of modern CSS: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/12/stat...
🔍 Explainable AI isn’t just a challenge for data scientists. It’s also a design challenge and a core pillar of trustworthy, effective AI products. Victor Yocco offers practical guidance and design patterns for building explainability into real products: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/12/beyo...
✨ CSS Masonry is almost here! Patrick Brosset takes a deep dive into what this long-awaited feature means for web developers and how you could make use of it in your own work: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/12/maso...
Illustrated desktop wallpaper. It shows a small cabin on an island in the middle of a frozen river surrounded by mountains. It is snowing, and the warm yellow light inside the cabin lights up the dark night.
Illustrated desktop wallpaper. It shows two Christmas dwarfs decorating the moon with fairy lights and wrapped presents.
Would you like to get featured in our upcoming wallpapers post? We’re still taking submissions for December, so don’t hesitate to join in. We’d love to see your story come to life!
📷️ Join in: www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/desk...
🤖 Server chaos doesn’t have to be the norm. Explore how AI-ready infrastructure and automation can bring clarity, performance, and focus back to your web work: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/11/simp...
There are many tips for improving your website's performance. But even if you follow all the advice, can you maintain an optimized site? And are you targeting the right pages?
↬ Matt Zeunert on effective strategies: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/11/effe...
(Article supported by @debugbear.com 💖)
🧩 With component variants, design systems become more flexible, letting you reuse components while easily adapting their look or state.
↬ Daniel Schwarz on how to manage them with design tokens in Penpot, the open-source tool for scalable, consistent design: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/11/how-...
Our Person of the Week is a Senior Product Designer, founder, and mentor on a mission to make design resources more accessible for designers. Drumroll, please, for... Ozan Öztaskiran!
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Ozan! 💖
#smashingcommunity
Drumroll, please, for our Person of the Week: Iain Bean! Iain is a Senior Developer interested in design systems, accessibility and typography. He’s also the creator of The Component Gallery.
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear
Iain Bean! 💖
#smashingcommunity
🌊 Over-reliance on static high-fidelity mockups often leaves the conceptual model and user flows dangerously underdeveloped. Can AI-powered prototyping be the answer? Is the future “vibe coding” or a more structured, intent-driven approach? www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/inte...