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Smashing Magazine · Design

Timing Charts: A Blueprint For SMIL Animations

Discover SMIL, the often-overlooked way to animate SVGs that works inside `` tags and can fully animate everything in an SVG without JavaScript.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Johan Grobler) 3 days ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

New EU Guidelines For AI Labelling

New EU guidelines, why AI sparkles aren’t enough, when AI labels are required, and what the rules mean for AI-powered features and products. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video courses on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Vitaly Friedman) 1 week ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie

When tasked with building a highly interactive, tactile web experience, the architecture must serve the art direction. In this article, Alexey Kopytin explains their architectural rationale for building a digital stress-relief squeeze toy game using Lottie animations, DOM events, and distance-based...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Alexey Kopytin) 1 week ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript

The gap between “you need a library for this” and “the browser does this” keeps closing. A practical guide to auditing your dependencies and finding what the web platform can now handle for you.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Jad Joubran) 2 weeks ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Small Joys And Big Adventures (August 2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Whether you’re enjoying some well-earned time off this August or are jumping headfirst into a new project, how about some new desktop wallpapers to accompany you on all those big and small adventures the month might bring? Well, we’ve got you covered!

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Cosima Mielke) 3 weeks ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

As AI reshapes product design, it could give designers greater autonomy or expose the gaps that autonomy makes harder to hide. Exploring both the bull and bear cases, Andy Budd examines what happens when designers need less permission to act.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Andy Budd) 3 weeks ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Thinking Outside The Box: Digital Design In The AI Era

Many of the AI tools we interact with take the form of text boxes. But what if there was a different way to interact with AI? Oleksii Hrzhehorzhevskyi explores a different approach to creating a new AI assistant and how designers can navigate the field as AI continues to change it.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Oleksii Hrzhehorzhevskyi) 3 weeks ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Weaponizing And Defending The React Flight Protocol: Deserialization Sinks In RSCs

While React Server Components rely on the custom Flight protocol to stream interactive UIs, this same mechanism introduces powerful deserialization sinks that attackers can exploit. Durgesh Pawar breaks down the mechanics behind the CVSS 10.0 “React2Shell” vulnerability to show how protocol manipula...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Durgesh Pawar) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

When It Makes Sense To “Block” The Main Thread

The common rule of thumb is to never “block” the browser’s main thread when running JavaScript tasks. But is this a hard rule? Victor Ayomipo describes a use case he encountered involving a screenshot extension where he made an exception to the rule and decided that blocking the main thread was abso...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Victor Ayomipo) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

No, People Don’t Want More AI In Their Life

Many companies assume everyone craves new AI features. But the reality is that most people don't want more AI — at least not in the way most AI leaders envision it. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video courses on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Vitaly Friedman) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

From Kickoff To First Concept: How To Turn Brand Strategy Into Visual Direction

The strongest visual concepts don’t start in Figma. They start with the right questions. Explore the pre-concept phase of brand identity design, where teams research brand context, uncover hidden assumptions with stakeholders, and turn shared direction into a visual foundation before a single concep...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Anastasia Sycheva) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Designing For Distressed Users: Why Mental Health Apps Shouldn’t Follow Every UI Fashion

Many UI trends are designed to capture attention and signal innovation, but those goals often conflict with the needs of mental health apps: reducing cognitive strain, fostering trust, and providing a sense of refuge. Kat Homan introduces an evaluation framework that helps designers assess whether t...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Kat Homan) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Meet Kirki: WordPress’s First Visual Builder With An Infinite Canvas

We have been building websites inside boxes for years on WordPress. Let’s take a closer look at [Kirki](https://kirki.com/), the first freeform visual builder with an infinite canvas, and explore how it redefines the experience with cleaner performance, full design freedom, and zero plugin dependenc...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Zareen Tasnim) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Users Don’t Need More Tools: They Need Seamless Integrations

A closer look at why users don’t need more tools in their daily lives. What they need are seamless integrations of useful features to match already existing, established mental models. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Vitaly Friedman) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Matching AI Modality To User Intent: Designing The Right Interface

We’ve fallen into conversational tunnel vision, defaulting every AI capability into a chat-based interface simply because LLMs are trained on dialogue data. But great UX is about matching modality to users’ context, intent, and cognitive load, so the interface adapts to the user, not the other way a...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Victor Yocco) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Why Accessibility Is An Operational Capability, Not A Feature

Teams can generate UI faster than ever, but they still have to guarantee that what they ship is usable, secure, and maintainable. Accessibility as an operational capability rather than a compliance checklist or end-of-project audit, and what that looks like in practice.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Mikhail Prosmitskiy) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Snapshots Of Summer (July 2026 Wallpapers Edition)

July is just around the corner, and that means... It’s time for some new desktop wallpapers! As every month, the wallpapers in this collection were created by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Cosima Mielke) 1 month ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Designing With Uncertainty: How AI Supercharges Probabilistic Thinking

In a world where AI is informing more design choices, it’s easy to mistake predictions for certainties. This article introduces Probabilistic Design, a mindset that allows UX and product teams to accept uncertainty, decipher AI outputs with nuance, and make smart, adaptive decisions.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Pratik Joglekar) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

The Impact Of Humanoid Robots On Humanity

We have officially moved past the era of humanoid robots as mere public relations stunts. As they become increasingly lifelike, society may soon face profound social, psychological, and ethical challenges. What happens when the boundary between humans and machines becomes almost impossible to distin...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Carrie Webster) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

The Benefits Of Cognitive Inclusion In UX Research

Findings from an exploratory user research study highlighting the unique insights and practical UX recommendations shared by participants with cognitive disabilities.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Kate Kalcevich) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

How To Make Your Design System AI-Ready

Practical guide on how to reduce drifts, minimize mistakes, maintain context, and improve the quality of AI-generated prototypes. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Vitaly Friedman) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

June Is For Exploring (2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Let’s kick off June — and the beginning of summer — with some fresh inspiration! Artists and designers from across the globe once again tickled their creativity to welcome the new month with a new collection of desktop wallpapers. Enjoy!

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Cosima Mielke) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Algorithmic Theming Engines: Building Self-Correcting Color Systems With `contrast-color()`

Seventy percent of websites still fail basic WCAG contrast checks in 2025. After years of design system tooling, accessibility linters, and JavaScript libraries, nothing moved the needle. We didn’t need better libraries. We needed better CSS. `contrast-color()` is that better CSS.

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Durgesh Pawar) 2 months ago

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Smashing Magazine · Design

Your Prototype Is Not Being Honest With Your Users (And Here’s How To Fix It)

There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re “doing it right.” That pause is a clear sign. They’ve already clocked that this isn’t a real app, and every data point collected after that mom...

hello@smashingmagazine.com (Eric Joseph L.) 2 months ago

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