Nothing is perfect on the web. We can’t make sure that our websites always work as intended, but we can try our best to design resilient and flexible websites that aren’t that easy to break — both in terms of interface design and security. Yet neither resilience nor flexibility are usually reflected in our deliverables and mock-ups.
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_Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team.
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Podcasts can be a great way to build a closer relationship with your customers and fans. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to regularly deliver new content, but the reward is more than worth the effort.
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It’s always great to have a little toolbox with just the right tools waiting for you when you need them. What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? What if you had just a good starter kit with everything you need to dive into the creative process without being distracted by routine tasks?
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As I was flying back from the Smashing Conference in New York, I wondered whether it was a success. This wasn’t an original thought. We are always wondering what makes a conference good and what elements will make industry workers stay away.
Good and bad are such subjective terms, though, with almost as many expectations as there are attendees. We decided that just looking at the numbers instead might be a good idea. This article will not present best practices for planning a conference, but rather will look at how it’s actually done most of the time. While this is not a guide to putting together the perfect conference, it gives a good overview of what seems to work and which elements are so unpredictable that they do not serve as reliable guidelines.
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Take any new interface design or display technology, and chances are that someone somewhere has already compared it to Minority Report. The 2002 dystopian film, with its see-through screens and gesture-driven interfaces, is remembered more for its futuristic tech than for the insidiousness of the technology — pre-crime prediction — that was its actual focus. It continues to be the standard by which we judge new interfaces.
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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the best writers, be it your favorite authors or those that write for Smashing Magazine, don’t do it alone. Often, they work with an editor (or two), who will help them coalesce their words into something more compelling or easier to understand.
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Fortunately, learning is not limited to only a small minority of people anymore; it is not even limited to visiting a school or a university. The Internet makes it possible for us to distribute knowledge at a small price, and is full of web design resources to expand everyone’s knowledge on an enormous variety of topics.
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In this article, we’ll go over the concepts and techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS. Building a command line tool enables you to automate a process that would otherwise take a lot longer.
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The Web is awash in content. A recent Moz article reports that 92,000 new articles are posted online every day. Companies are spending billions on content marketing to enhance credibility, build brand awareness and, especially of late, improve SEO.
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