Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

Strong UX ideas do not secure investment on their own. Through a worked example, Alex Williams breaks down how to define business value, calculate costs, test causality, and build a credible case for the return on a design initiative. - UX - Design - Business

TThe web is evolving beyond menus, forms, and endless clicks toward experiences shaped around human intent. For UX designers, understanding this shift means re-evaluating their role, moving from designing visible interfaces to guiding transparent, intent-driven AI experiences.

Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a new collection of desktop wallpapers? Whether you’re holding tightly onto summer or eagerly awaiting autumn, we’ve got some eye-catching designs to make your September just a bit more colorful. Enjoy!

Data visualisation sits at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely talk to each other: data and design. Meriem Benhabiles explores what changes when you bring structured UX thinking to dashboards and data presentations, from the questions you ask before opening any tool to the decisions that determine whether an insight actually lands.

Every website peaks on launch day and slowly drifts from there, not because it breaks, but because nobody has time to keep it current. Autonomous websites, continuously optimized by agents after launch, aim to change that. Pierre Burgy shares what they learned building for full website autonomy and the deeper design problem they uncovered along the way.

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

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.

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 math to maintain absolute control over their designers’ intentional motion.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 manipulation can lead to remote code execution.

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 absolutely the right thing to do.

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.

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 concept is created.

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 trendy visual and interaction patterns support or undermine the unique goals of mental health experi…

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 dependency.

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.

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 around.