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Smashing Magazine
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An online magazine for designers and web developers. Questions? The Smashing Team has your back! Curated by Iris, Vitaly, and the Support team.
🧩 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-...
November 5, 2025 at 11:51 AM
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
November 4, 2025 at 10:31 AM
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
October 27, 2025 at 1:06 PM
🌊 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...
Intent Prototyping: The Allure And Danger Of Pure Vibe Coding In Enterprise UX (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
Yegor Gilyov examines the problem of over-reliance on static high-fidelity mockups, which often leave the conceptual model and user flows dangerously underdeveloped. He then explores whether AI-powere...
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September 25, 2025 at 2:14 PM
✨ Creating motion can be tricky. Too much distracts, too little feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. Learn how to bring them into your projects: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/ambi...
September 22, 2025 at 4:25 PM
👥 Personas often take a lot of work to create, yet deliver little value. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/func...
September 18, 2025 at 4:37 PM
🔍 Real-time search results power smarter apps, whether for SEO, price monitoring, AI training, or local data parsing. See how tools like SerpApi make it easy to pull, customize, and integrate this data directly into your app or website: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/serp...
September 17, 2025 at 10:56 AM
🎨 Elastic and bounce effects are motion design favorites, but also some of the most time-consuming to create. Luckily, new tools make it easier. Meet Expressive Animator: lively animations in seconds, no tedious work of manual keyframe editing required: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/crea...
September 15, 2025 at 12:35 PM
🌀 CSS Cascade Layers sound neat, but what happens when you drop them into a messy legacy codebase? Let’s talk about the experience of integrating cascade layers into real-world code, the good, the bad, and the spaghetti: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/inte...
Integrating CSS Cascade Layers To An Existing Project — Smashing Magazine
The idea behind this is to share a full, unfiltered look at integrating CSS Cascade Layers into an existing legacy codebase. In practice, it’s about refactoring existing CSS to use cascade layers with...
www.smashingmagazine.com
September 10, 2025 at 5:21 PM
📺 After covering in detail the underlying interaction paradigms of TV experiences in Part 1, it’s time to get practical. Explore the building blocks of the “10-foot experience” and how to best utilise them in your designs: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/09/desi...
September 5, 2025 at 11:39 AM
🤖 Prompting is more than giving AI instructions. Think of it as a design act, part creative brief and part conversation design.

Let’s explore a designerly approach to prompting: one that blends creative briefing, interaction design, and structural clarity: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/prom...
August 29, 2025 at 1:44 PM
📺 TV interface design is a unique, fascinating, often overlooked field. Guided by decades of evolution and innovation, yet still constrained by its legacy. Follow Milan into the history, quirks, and unshakable rules that dictate how we control these devices: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/desi...
August 28, 2025 at 12:13 PM
🌐 PWAs are a great way to make apps built for the web feel native, but moving away from a browser environment can introduce usability issues.

↬ Declan explains how we can modify our app depending on what display mode is applied to mitigate these issues: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/opti...
August 26, 2025 at 10:49 AM
✨ What would a week with AI in your UX workflow actually look like? A grounded, week-long experiment shows how to integrate AI into your design process without losing the human touch: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/week...
August 22, 2025 at 5:23 PM
🎨 The colors we choose are the silent language of our digital products, and speaking it fluently is key to success.

Rodolpho Henrique guides you through building effective and scalable color palettes with accessibility in mind: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/psyc...
August 21, 2025 at 10:57 AM
🤖 AI tools are improving fast, but it’s still not clear how they fit into a real product design workflow. Nikita Samutin maps four core stages — analytics, ideation, prototyping, and visual design — to show where AI helps and where it doesn’t: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/beyo...
August 19, 2025 at 11:31 AM
🎯 Prompting isn’t just about writing better instructions, but about designing better thinking. From research and brainstorming to testing and beyond, advanced prompting can speed up your workflow and improve results. Here’s how to put it to work: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/desi...
August 11, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Internationalization isn’t just translation, but also dates, plurals, name sorting, and more, all tailored to each locale. Instead of relying on heavy third-party libraries, modern JavaScript offers the Intl API — a powerful, native way to handle i18n: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/powe...
August 8, 2025 at 12:51 PM
✨ Talking points. Smart questions. A compelling story. This guide helps you prepare for your UX job interview. And remember: no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/ux-j...
August 6, 2025 at 10:41 AM
💥 Event listeners power interactivity in JavaScript — but if not removed properly, they can cause memory leaks. And what if you need to pass parameters? Amejimaobari Ollornwi shares which JS features make it all possible and safe: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/hand...
July 22, 2025 at 1:54 AM
🤖 Designing a new AI feature? Where do you even begin? From first steps to design flows and interactions, here’s a simple, systematic approach to building AI experiences that stick: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/desi...
July 17, 2025 at 10:11 AM
🧙‍♂️ The Wizard of Oz method is a proven UX research tool that simulates real interactions to reveal authentic user behavior. Explores its fundamentals, advanced techniques, and key considerations — including its relevance in the emerging field of agentic AI: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/unma...
July 11, 2025 at 5:27 AM
⏱️ As always in design, timing matters — and so do timely notifications. Let’s explore how we can improve the notifications UX: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/desi...
July 9, 2025 at 7:45 AM
🧩 Traditional page builders have shaped how we build WordPress sites for years. Meet Droip — a modern, no-code visual builder offering cleaner performance, full design freedom, and zero plugin dependency: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/mode...
July 8, 2025 at 1:11 PM
✨ Bridging the gap between user research insights and actual organizational action — with a clear roadmap for impact: www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/turn...
July 2, 2025 at 10:31 AM